“The Tuxedo” starts out with an interesting premise: taxi driver Jimmy Tong (Jackie Chan) discovers a high-tech tuxedo when his boss, Clark Devlin (Jason Isaacs), suffers a massive head wound from an explosion and is rushed to the hospital.

This special tuxedo has the ability to do almost anything one can dream of, and this is where the movie takes off and goes downhill.

Tong uses the tuxedo, and uses it, and uses it and uses it.

He uses it for almost every scene in the movie; you will begin to think he’s totally inept without the tuxedo. And the embarrassing part is, he has to use the tuxedo’s powers to fight, and it’s not just normal Chan-style fighting where he does his own stunts, but computer generated fighting, where you know he isn’t.

This is both sad and begs the question: why would Chan want to put his name in a movie that doesn’t feature genuine fighting?

The plot of the movie is pretty mediocre. Banning (Ritchie Coster) wants to use water striders, those bugs that skate across the surface of water, to carry a deadly bacteria and ruin the world’s water supply. The bacteria would cause anyone who drinks tap water to dehydrate in seconds. Banning wants to make it so everyone in the world will have to drink his brand of bottled water.

Tong and associates have to stop him, of course.

Confused? So am I. How do bugs carry the bacteria, and how exactly does bacteria trigger the dehydration effect, and how do you completely contaminate the world’s water supply? And if you taint all of the water in the world, which is about two-thirds of the Earth, wouldn’t the bottled water be tainted, too?

So the writing is far from being up to par. It’s as if the writers didn’t care about the script and put in anything to keep the movie going. The result is a jumbled mess.

The only thing saving this movie from getting a flat-out F is Isaacs. He tries so hard to give the movie some class that he deserves some points.

Overall, this movie is an unsophisticated version of a James Bond picture. It’s bad.