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Tuxedo, The
When his secret agent boss ends up in a coma, a hapless chauffeur borrows his gadget-packed dinner suit and takes on the bad guys himself. Jackie Chan and Jennifer Love Hewitt star
After Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon, it looked as if Hollywood had finally found the right vehicles for Jackie Chan's premier league martial arts talents, movies that let him also employ his second division comic skills without completely burying the film in rubber-faced mugging and aimless slapstick. Then along comes a film like this. Chan plays Jimmy Tong, chauffeur to Bond-alike superspy Clark Devlin (Isaacs). When Devlin ends up in a coma after an explosion, Jimmy "borrows" Devlin's gadget-loaded tuxedo and, aided by trainee agent Delilah Blaine (Hewitt), sets out after the bad guys himself. Cue scraps, leering villains, a smattering of sexual innuendo and an audience steadily losing the will to live. The Tuxedo is simply rubbish. Even if it wasn't saddled with 007 pastiches and Christmas cracker special effects, the sheer charisma bypass that the two leads seem to have undergone would be enough to hamstring it. Chan spends the entire film mugging, while Jennifer Love Hewitt is simply wooden. The only one to come out of this with any credit is Isaacs, whose charming superspy will do his chances of getting the real Bond gig once Brosnan retires no end of good. It's just a shame he spends most of the film in a coma. Verdict Dreary, deadly dull, and dumb, this is low-rent formula filmmaking at its most brain-numbing. Jackie Chan really shouldn't be allowed to make films without a talented comic partner (Owen Wilson, Chris Tucker) to distract audiences from the slapstick nonsense he seems addicted to. |
