TUXEDO

Something happened when Hollywood started producing Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan’s movies. They kept his death-defying stunts and crowd-pleasing comedy in movies such as TUXEDO, but also added off-color sexual and scatological humor, which depreciates his “good vs. evil” stories. In fact, TUXEDO is more “OK vs. greedy.”

In the our interview with Jackie Chan, he said to the reporters present, “I don’t like TUXEDO, and I don’t like the story. I just like Steven Spielberg, and I like the studio [DreamWorks].” He added, “I want to stop making American movies and go back to making Asian movies.” He is probably being more self-critical than necessary, but those are discouraging words for his ardent fans.

TUXEDO opens with a beautiful idyllic natural scene of a waterfall with a deer coming to drink. Suddenly, the deer raises its tail and relieves himself in the stream. As the credits role, the urine flows into the water supply and into a water bottling plant. A man drinks the water and seems to gag as he tries to call the top secret United States agency, the CSA. A plastic bag is put over his head and filled with water. He is drowned as his cell phone is answered.

Cut to Jimmy Tong, a taxi driver who lusts after a beautiful Asian girl who works in an art gallery. He’s known as the fastest cab driver in New York. After an inadvertent run-in with a street bully, he finds a buttoned up woman in the back seat of his taxi, who says that she will double the fare if he can get her across town by the time she puts on her makeup.

When he succeeds, she tells him that the famous playboy billionaire Clark Devlin, will hire him as his chauffeur. Clark Devlin is not all that he appears, however. He is actually a top-secret CSA agent.

Clark gets wounded by a bomb. Before he slips into a coma, he tells Jimmy that Jimmy has to take over for Clark in fighting a ruthless water baron, who wants to corner the world’s water market. His secret weapon is a tuxedo that can turn him into anything from a great dancer to a karate king to an incredible sniper…and even to a wall-crawling semi-spiderman.

Jimmy is teamed up with another C.S.A. agent, who had never met Clark, named Del Blaine, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. The villain, named Diedrich Banning, has developed a certain water formula that makes people thirsty. His first trials of his new water have some undesirable consequences. The people who drink it turn into dehydrated corpses. (We hate when that happens!) Next, he plans to introduce this dehydrating water into all the major water supplies, so that Banning Water can corner the market. Only Jimmy and Del stand in the way of his conquest of the American water supply.

TUXEDO is a movie filled with good ideas for an action/adventure/comedy, which are never strung together in a cohesive fashion. Director Kevin Donovan says that the movie was first aimed at children, then well into the pre-production he was told to transform it into a teenage flick, and then he was told to tone it down just before shooting started.

Thus, the movie has ended up being a no more than showcase for Jackie Chan’s spectacular, death-defying feats. The jeopardy is contrived, and the plot alternates between high-octane action and massive plot holes. This is a rough cab drive in a tuxedo.

All of that would be okay except for the constant stream of off-color, and even dirty sexual innuendo. There is a lengthy scene of Jackie shaking his booty in the face of a vacuous blonde, and a lengthier scene of the blonde trying to strip him and have sex with him in her hotel suite.

Significant editing would have gone a long way in TUXEDO. Verbal and visual references finally stretched the movie out to unbearable clutter of sexual innuendo. On one side of me at the screening an over-40 reviewer said, “This is boring.” On the other side, his 16-year-old son said, “This is fun,” showing that if you’re in the concrete stage of cognitive development and can’t think through the stages of a plot, you might like this movie.

The movie features the directorial debut of Kevin Donovan, an award-winning commercial director. (Warning: Award-winning commercial directors often have great trouble sustaining a 90-minute movie. They’re used to doing 30 second formats, and that mindset certainly shows itself in TUXEDO. Can somebody in Hollywood tell the difference between a 30 second commercial and a feature film?)

Jackie Chan is himself, as usual, and acts the same in the outtakes of the movie as he does in the movie. Jennifer Love Hewitt holds the movie together and does an admirable job. Jason Isaacs, who plays Clark Devlin, should have been given more screen time. He knows how to carry a scene, just as he did when he played the villain in THE PATRIOT.

The stunts in TUXEDO are terrific, the lighting is beautiful, and the water bottles show the master touch of a commercial television director. But, the play’s the thing that captures the attention of the king, and it takes more than pretty moments and high-octane action to sustain a movie.