Jamie Foxx followed up his Oscar win with this sly sci-fi flop

Taylor Hackford’s “Ray,” a 2004 biography chronicling the life of legendary musician Ray Charles, closely follows the conventions of the genre. He wears his sentimentality on his sleeve, the kind that often accompanies biographical portraits of geniuses, and uses embellishments to heighten his dramatic stakes. Despite these genre trappings, “Ray” stands out as an emotional and lively drama because of Jamie Foxx’s central performance, which oozes charisma. Foxx disappears into the role of the titular boundary-pushing artistbringing the man’s eccentricities to life to a compelling ending. No doubt, the success of “Ray” can also be attributed to Foxx, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in the film. Aside from being nominated in over five categories at the Academy Awards, Ray also won the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing (which he clearly deserves).

“Ray” is not the only film Showcasing Foxx’s amazing ability to embody dramatic rolesbut it certainly helped boost his credibility as a performer in conjunction with “Guarantees.” The latter, directed by Michael Mann, also came out in 2004 and features a great (not to mention Oscar-nominated) performance from the director. Foxx, who stars against Tom Cruise as the film’s intensely sadistic antagonist. One hoped that Foxx would be able to continue his hot streak, but alas, his first film after “Ray” was both a critical and commercial failure, which ended up becoming one of the biggest flops in cinema history.

That insidious project was Rob Cohen’s “Stealth,” a Top Gun sci-fi action film centered around three fighter pilots tasked with building a stealth drone. So, what exactly went wrong with “Stealth,” and why did it bomb so hard?

Spoilers Followed by “Ghost”.

“Stealth” is set in the near future, but every technological innovation powered by the film’s central characters completely defies logic. Scientific terminology is used quite liberally, but the moment you start thinking about the sci-fi concepts in the film, it collapses like a house of cards. The experts pushing for such innovation are fighter pilots Lieutenant Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lieutenant Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and Lieutenant Henry Purcell (Fox), who have been selected to be part of a prestigious US Navy program. The program in question has developed the F/A-37 Talon, a single-seat fighter-bomber with improved and customized characteristics, where the next step is to install artificial intelligence called “Extreme Deep Invader” (EDI) to further simplify this invention. .

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this idea, which seems pretty ordinary by dystopian science fiction standards. If anything, The concept of an autonomous artificial intelligence (similar to that in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning”) “Learning” empathy, ethics, and common sense from a group of human pilots can easily turn into something complex and thought-provoking. However, “Stealth” fails to portray its human characters by making them shallow in a way that belies the serious subject matter at hand. What’s more, every mission they undertake together – including the one in which they miraculously fly to Rangoon within… truly Short of time and coming up with a rescue plan that doesn’t make sense – it goes beyond suspension of disbelief. Nothing Gannon, Wade, and Purcell do or say feels like something that could actually happen in reality, and that feeling persists throughout.

You’re probably wondering, “Sure, ‘Stealth’ is a bit uninspired, but is it fun?” Unfortunately, that’s not the case, even during the moments when the characters indulge in some fun while on a trip to Thailand to escape all their rule-breaking. In the end, all the extravagant marketing touting “Stealth” as the big summer blockbuster of 2005 was for nothing. The film lacked the juice and substance to claim that title.