The Tuxedo (Full Screen Edition)
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Movie Reviews of The Tuxedo (Full Screen Edition)
Movie Review: Not that bad
Summary: 3 Stars
Critic Roger Ebert hated the Tuxedo because Jackie Chan doesn't do his own stunt work and relys on special effects. Yes that's true but Jackie Chan is a funny guy. Eventhough he's popular for doing his own stunts he doesn't need to do that in all his movies. The Tuxedo is a still a funny and entertaing movie. Although the action is bad the movie still works as a comedy and I liked Jackie Chan in it. Jason Issacs (The Patriot) is good as well as the secret agent Clarke Devlin and shows that he wouldn't be a bad choice for the next James Bond. Jennifer Love Hewitt has some fun as well and is cute although she can be a bit on the annoying side. The film is entertaining and funny even if the script is bad and the villain plans to unleast poiseness bugs that don't even exist.Movie Review: Definitely not one of Jackie Chan's better movies.
Summary: 2 Stars
I watched this one over the weekend based on a second-hand recommendation that "this is actually a pretty good movie." Not so. I have seen most of the films Jackie Chan has made over the past ten years or so, and normally I find them to be fun and entertaining. This one, on the other hand, qualified only marginally in either category.Jackie plays Jimmy Tong, a humble taxi driver turned chauffeur for the suave Clark Devlin. Devlin is a "James Bond" type of high tech spy equipped with all sorts of amazing gadgetry, not the least of which is a tuxedo which essentially "takes control" of the wearer's neurological system to perform all manner of untrained actions, from acrobatics and ballroom dancing to martial arts and rifle marksmanship, with a host of other functions in between.
Devlin's task to is to thwart the maniacal villain (whose name escapes me, but is of no consequence in any event) whose plan is to get filthy rich by cornering the world water market. He proposes to do this by contaminating all known freshwater reservoirs with a deadly bacteria that causes hyper-dehydration and leaves its victims a dry, brittle shell. This makes for some rather disturbing death scenes at various points in the movie. As the head of a major bottled water company, the bad guy and his partners would stand to make megabucks until the problem is cleared up.
Devlin is doing his best to make sure this doesn't come to pass, but is incapacitated in an assassination attempt. Jimmy Tong (Chan) takes his place (and the tuxedo) to become an impromptu super-spy. He gets partnered with a rookie female agent, the lovely Del Blaine (how unexpected!). Together they bungle their way through the mission, with Del making liberal use of her womanly wiles, and somehow, against all odds and the known laws of physics, manage to stop the bad guy. Along the way, there are plenty of action sequences in the typical Jackie Chan style, replete with humor but frankly leaning a little too much toward slapstick. Needless to say, Jackie plies his martial arts skills in several scenes, but not with the same eye-catching, how-in-the-world-did-he-do-that effect that he normally manages.
In short, I thought this one was less than riveting, not very suspenseful, with shallow humor and too much predictability. One of the few redeeming virtues was a cameo appearance by James Brown. Other than that, though, this film has very little to recommend it. Not likely to rent this one again soon -- or ever.
Movie Review: And I like Jackie Chan...
Summary: 1 Stars
Summary:Jimmy Tong (Jackie Chan) is a great cab driver, but horrible with women. Apparently his cab driving skills have gotten around (not sure how that works) and he is suddenly recruited by a secret agency to be the driver of their best agent, Clark Devlin (Jason Isaacs). Jimmy comes to idolize Clark because he is remarkably smooth with women and a surprisingly nice guy. But when an attempt to kill Clark ends up putting him in the hospital, Jimmy decides to take over his role.
Quickly Jimmy finds out that a large part of Clark's special abilities come from 'The Tuxedo' that he normally wears. It's actually much more than a regular tuxedo, incorporating pretty much every single gadget/device James Bond could have ever wanted and much, much more. It even gives Jimmy the ability to fight, which he didn't have before - he was just a big wimp that could drive fast.
As part of his attempt to be Clark Devlin he is contacted by another agent who was supposed to be teamed up with Clark, Del Blaine (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who is only slightly less dim-witted than Jimmy, and Jimmy has no training as an agent. Their mission: find Diedrich Banning (Ritchie Coster) and figure out how he is planning on getting a bacterial agent into the U.S. water supply that causes... you'll never guess... dehydration.
My Comments:
I like Jackie Chan. He can be pretty funny and knowing that he does most of his stunts, most of which are pretty remarkably, tends to make his films very entertaining. But this is definitely the exception. The problems in this movie are too numerous to count, but I'll start with the story.
So we obviously aren't breaking any new territory with a bad guy trying to make gazillions of dollars using a biological weapon to bring the world to its knees... but how many plots can you come up with that involve special agents? So, I'll give them some leeway on that, but that's all the patience I have. Where the movie goes remarkably off course is when the major plot point/revelation makes no sense: Why does Jimmy decide to become Clark Devlin instead of just contacting the agency he works for and telling him there's been an accident? Maybe if Jimmy were a martial experts, but no - he couldn't defend himself from a crippled old woman without the help of The Tuxedo. Along with this major problem come innumerable story holes and jumps in the story sequence that turn the movie into a sequence of disassociated scenes that make absolutely no sense. So, the storyline has major problems, what about the acting team?
No luck there. Sure, Jennifer Love Hewitt is cute, but her character suffers from disassociative identity disorder (multiple personalities). One moment she's a ditz that can't fight or doing anything right, the next she is kicking people's heads in, then she becomes a seductress, and suddenly she is a molecular biologist. There is no continuity to her performance; it's a messy hodgepodge of cute outfits and silly lines. Sadly, the movie elements that typically make Jackie Chan so much fun, his witty one-liners and inability to understand what others are saying, do not work in this film. He and Jennifer are not a match made in heaven or anywhere for that matter. There is no chemistry; it's almost as though she's impatient with her foreign compatriot and would rather be doing steamy love scenes with Ben Affleck, who's about her same caliber of actor.
There isn't much to like about this film. Frankly, there is almost nothing to like about this film about two secret agents that don't have a clue and aren't even funny while making fools out of themselves. Jackie can and has done better. Jennifer, well, she's young and cute; maybe it will get her somewhere. Otherwise, this is a definite 'do not see', even if you like Jackie Chan.