The Tuxedo (2002)

The Tuxedo arrives from 2002 as a spy spoof in which a New York cab driver inherits his employer's enchanted tuxedo and, with it, the ability to dance, sing, fight, and cling to walls. The suit is the star. Jackie Chan is the man inside it, paired with Jennifer Love Hewitt, an Asian male lead opposite a white female co-star at a moment when Hollywood rarely bothered. The film does not bother either. It casts the pairing as ordinary genre business and moves on, which is its own kind of quiet progress and its own kind of nothing.

What social conscience the picture possesses is corporate. The villain runs a company, Banning Corporation, and wants to corner the global drinking water supply by poisoning reservoirs with genetically modified insects. This is the stock evil-corporation playbook, trotted out without a shred of systemic argument. The water is a terrorism device, not an environmental warning. Jennifer Love Hewitt's Del Blaine is introduced as a brilliant scientist and then steadily downgraded into a shrew; the film's parting advice to her is to be more accommodating if she ever wants a boyfriend. Any feminist reading collapses on contact with that final scene.

The rest of the ledger is empty. No LGBTQ characters or subtext. No body positivity. No neurodivergent figures. No revisionist history. No climate sermon. The film lectures no one, which is perhaps the only thing it does cleanly. It squanders a gifted physical performer on weightless effects and a plot that critics found incomprehensible, and it collected a modest return for the trouble. The tuxedo works. The movie does not.