The Tuxedo
Dreamworks Home Entertainment
Cast: Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, Jason Isaacs, Debi Mazaar
Extras: Outtakes, Deleted Scenes, Featurette, Trailer
Rating:
Prepared as a Special Edition, Dreamworks Home Entertainment is now sending Jackie Chan’s latest movie ’The tuxedo’ into the DVD race. However, Jackie Chan fans will find that this film is sadly one of the weakest and unsatisfying Jackie Chan showings in many years.
While the story of Jackie playing a chauffeur who accidentally becomes a master-spy as a result of a super- powered Tuxedo has a lot of promise to make this one of the greatest and spectacular spy-spoofs ever to grace the silver screen, the film sadly falls short on so many ends. The problem of the movie is almost entirely Michael J. Wilson and Michael Lesson’s incoherent script that plays like a rag-tag collage of idea rather than a consistent story. Characters like Jennifer Love-Hewitt’s Del Blaine are evidence that the writers simply had no direction and did not really know what to do with the part. One second she’s supposed to be dead- serious, the next she’s a rookie mouthing off to a master-spy, and the next second she’s a bumbling and fumbling idiot. Somehow all that just doesn’t make sense and break the film. Love-Hewitt certainly did her best to save the part, but when things are broken like this, there’s little you can do.
Jackie Chan fans will also miss the physical stunts and action sequences, which are extremely rare and brief in this film.
Dreamworks Home Entertainment is presenting ’The Tuxedo’ in a good-looking widescreen transfer on this DVD that is enhanced for 16×9 TV sets. A fullscreen version is also sold separately. The print is free of defects and blemishes and the color reproduction is solid with strong colors that never bleed. Blacks are well-balanced creating an image with plenty of depth and good shadow definition. While some minor edge-enhancement is evident on occasion it never becomes distracting. The compression of the film has been handled fairly well, although quite a few artifacts are evident, mostly notable in the lack of image detail and break-up of the image definition as soon as there is movement in the picture.
The audio on the DVD is a 5.1 channel Dolby Digital track that is complemented by en equally convincing DTS audio track and an English Dolby surround track in English and a French 5.1 channel Dolby Digital track. Reducing the number of audio tracks may have freed up some room to improve on the film’s video compression, but her ewe are with a vast option of audio tracks.
The DVD contains a few outtakes, most of which are just repetitions of those found running under the movie’s end credits, interspersed with a few new ones. An HBO First Look featurette is also on the disc, but given its promotional focus, it doesn’t’ contain much value to real film enthusiasts. Deleted and extended scenes can also be found on the disc as well as the movie’s trailer.
I had high hopes of ’The Tuxedo’ and was disappointed at the lack of direction and wit of the movie. While Dreamworks created a fairly solid DVD, I just don’t care that much for the movie itself.
