The Movie: I love this movie! Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan are back together in this sequel to Rush Hour and if you ask me, this is one of those rare occasions where the sequel surpasses the original. Chock full of ad-libbed comedy and Jackie Chan's "situation-fighting", this movie is entertaining from start to finish. Plus it's got some Zhang Ziyi, and a little bit of Las Vegas action, so how can it go wrong?

Vegas, baby!

That Zhang Ziyi... she's so cute when she's mad! There are plenty of funny and memorable scenes such as Chris Tucker putting on a big show at the craps table, and of course the scene with Don Cheadle conversing in Chinese with Jackie Chan about martial arts training from Master Ching. These days so many comedies out there are just full of campy parody and low-brow humor, but this movie is genuinely funny without having to resort to either. And oops! I almost forgot to mention the bloopers at the end credits!

The DVD: It seems like every DVD out there is a "special edition" and that every studio has their label for their super special editions -- in this case, New Line Cinema's "Infinifilm". The packaging really hypes up the Infinifilm features claiming that you'll "go beyond the movie" and that it will be a "unique experience". It really is overly hyped up on the packaging.

That being said, this DVD did not disappoint. The film was presented in a widescreen anamorphic format (which I think is actually a little wider than 2.35:1), and the film transfer is excellent (although in some places it seemed like the reds blew up a little bit). I really liked the clever menu designs, particularly the scene selection menu which looks exactly like a slot machine display, down to the "Winner Paid" and "Play up to 3 coins" messages.

This disc is chock full excellent special features! Lots of insights into the making of the film, the locations, the actors, the director and the whole process, and it was actually somewhat entertaining as well as informative. On top of all of the behind the scenes type stuff, the subtitle track of the movie contains random factoids that you can read throughout the movie. There is also director's commentary, deleted scenes (also with director's commentary), more outtakes, and of course, the standard selection of trailers and filmographies.

And while many DVD's feature a high quality anamorphic widescreen format for the film, most skimp out on the image quality in the special features section, keeping them either letterboxed with horrible film transfers, or in standard 4:3 format. This DVD's anamorphic widescreen format carried through not only the movie itself, but through every last bit of special feature on this disc, from the menus to the behind the scenes footage. You get the feeling that whoever was in charge of putting this disc together owns a widescreen TV and was sick of aspect ratio switches and seeing shoddy film transfers in the special features section, since even the behind the scenes footage shot on video were in a widescreen format!

If you have a DVD-ROM drive in your computer, this disc also features DVD-ROM content, including the movie script which you can read along as the movie plays in a little window (or even print out, if you please) -- lightyears ahead of most discs that claim to have "DVD-ROM content" which usually amounts to nothing more than a page with a link to the movie's website.

A great movie with an excellent film transfer, great menu design (but not quite as great as the Willy Wonka ones in my opinion), and the hands down best special features I've ever seen add up to Rush Hour 2 becoming my favorite DVD in my collection so far!