THE TUXEDO (2002)

 

As bad as HEAT is, though, I would say THE TUXEDO is worse, perhaps because Jackie Chan has more talent in one foot than Joe Piscopo has in his whole body.

Chan plays Jimmy Tong, a Chinese-American who drives a taxi and longs after a pretty Chinese woman, though he can't work up the nerve to ask her out. He gets a job as a personal driver for a smooth fellow named Clark Devlin (Jason Isaacs). Devlin takes a fancy to Jimmy and lets Jimmy see his ritzy apartment, though he warns the driver not to touch a special case with a tuxedo inside. Their conversations suggest to Jimmy that Devlin is a James Bond-like superspy, and Jimmy asks his employer for advice on girls. Jimmy acts toward Devlin like a mentor, even though at the time Chan, pushing fifty, was almost ten years older than Isaacs.

Then Devlin appears to perish in an exploding car, and Jimmy, having only rudimentary knowledge of the spy's agenda, decides to seek out his killer. He dons the mysterious tuxedo and finds that it's a genie's lamp that can do almost anything: prompt him with the knowledge he needs in any situation, or force Jimmy's unskilled body to perform athletic wonders. By dumb luck Jimmy contacts a newbie spy from Devlin's agency, a young woman named Del (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and convinces her that he's the legendary Clark Devlin. Together they investigate a terrorist corporation out to pollute U.S. reservoirs with a fairly ingenious plot involving "water strider" insects.

As in many of his later films, Chan mugs through his part, while Hewitt tries to match his lunacy by playing her character as equally loopy. Chan's role seems like an idea that might've worked a little better for a younger actor, particularly with respect to his mooning over an unrequited love, but the actor's attempts to act cute at nearly fifty years of age are doomed from the word go. In some scenes Chan is aided by FX to accomplish his stunts, but there are enough real athletics to please the devoted Chan-fancier. But in my case, the lameness of the superspy routine and the paltry characterizations make THE TUXEDO inferior even to a dog like DEAD HEAT.