Jamie Foxx, why do you do things like this?
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
I can only hope that Jamie Foxx either made Stealth, which opens July 29, or was under contract to make it before his great MVP season of 2004-2005. In the last eleven months, we’ve seen him in three powerful roles.
First came the HBO piece Redemption, the story of Stan “Tookie” Williams, the founder of the notorious Los Angeles street gang, the Crips. The film followed Tookie’s road from fatherless man-child to original gangster to San Quentin lifer to Nobel Prize-nominated peace activist.
Then came Collateral, where Foxx garnered co-billing with mega movie star Tom Cruise. He played an L.A. cab driver with severely damaged dreams, who is kidnapped one night by Cruise’s lethal hitman and forced to chauffer him around for the evening and then participate in a grizzly round of multiple murders.
Finally, Foxx blasted American movie screens apart in the fall of 2004 with his uncanny channelling of the spirit of the “Genius of Soul,” Mr. Ray Charles Robinson, known to us, simply, as Ray. Foxx received the ultimate reward, an Oscar, for best actor in a dramatic role as Ray.
Now comes Stealth. What’s up with this, Jamie?
Stealth is, first of all, a giant video game. Its core audience appears to be young boys. When it’s not busy lighting up like a Playstation rig, it rearranges some interesting human (and Hollywood) obsessions.
The first is the eternal confrontation between the mythic and the real, or between man and superman. Foxx, Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel play three hotshot jet fighter pilots. They are commanded and bullied by Sam Shephard, their mentor and the evil genius, so to speak, behind the film’s rather pedestrian plot. Shephard announces, out of the blue, that the holy three are to be joined, within 24 hours, by a fourth pilot. That fourth pilot is EDI, also known as Eddie.
EDI is an acronym for Enemy Deep Invader. This is a jet fighter representing the most advanced scientific thinking. This version of the superman myth is a technical marvel run by A.I. – that would be artificial intelligence – replete with its own eerie voice and dry sense of humor. It also is rumored to be evolving, but at a rate that humans cannot possibly comprehend. Here’s where the conflict between human and superhuman begins to juice the film and make it, almost, interesting to an adult.
Foxx protests to Shephard that the magic of the number three, the holy trinity – himself, Lucas and Biel – is being violated by the addition of Eddie. Lucas and Biel are a little more rational in their opposition; they simply don’t believe that Eddie is ready to ride with them. He hasn’t been battle-tested and his kinks haven’t been worked out.
There is a telling exchange between Shephard and Foxx about ten minutes into the film. Shephard, exasperated, looks Foxx right in the eye and shouts at the top of his lungs, “You wanted to be on the cutting edge – Eddie is as cutting as the edge gets! This is it!” Little do we know that Jamie is about to drop off the edge.
Director Rob Cohen has that knack for making big budget films demographically interesting. There’s something for eveybody.
There’s the video game highlight film of the battle scenes and explosions for the kids.
There are the philosophical ruminations for those who want to meditate on the power of human ingenuity versus artificial intelligence. (Although it should be said that machines’ superiority to humans has been debunked in every film I’ve ever seen. Remember how HAL, the supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001, gets his clock cleaned by human astronauts?)
There’s the beautiful and virtuous female pilot – she can also kick ass, by the way – who, through the power of her intelligence and virtue, overcomes the playboy instincts of the drop-dead handsome star; this is for those of you who still believe in such things.
There’s the hard-driving, old-school soldier, whose ambition has driven him into an unprincipled position; but, in the end, he returns to his roots and does the honorable thing.
There’s a cliché for everybody. Even those of you who freak out when you see the deck of a real honest-to-goodness aircraft carrier will be able to get off in the two-plus hours it takes to absorb all this stuff.
The dialogue is the weakest element of the film. The time it takes to create the big bangs and endless forward motion of jet propulsion didn’t leave Cohen and his co-writer W.D. Richter any time to think about the way people really talk.