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

Taylor Hackford’s Ray, the 2004 biopic about the life of legendary musician Ray Charles, adheres closely to 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 drama. Despite these genre trappings, Ray emerges as a poignant, upbeat drama thanks to Jamie Foxx’s charismatic lead. Fox disappears as the titular boundary-pushing artistbringing the man’s quirks to life to convincing ends. The success of The Ray can undoubtedly be attributed to Fox, who won an Oscar for Best Actor for his work in the film. In addition to being nominated in more than five categories at the Academy Awards, The Ray also won an Oscar for Best Sound Mixing (which is clearly deserved).

“The Ray” is not the only film to demonstrate Fox’s incredible ability to embody dramatic rolesbut it definitely helped establish his credibility as a performer in conjunction with Collateral. The latter, directed by Michael Mann, also came out in 2004 and features a thrilling (not to mention Oscar-nominated) performance Fox, who holds his own against Tom Cruise as the film’s violent, sadistic antagonist. It was hoped that Fox would be able to continue his hot streak, but alas, his first film after Ray was both a critical and commercial failure, eventually becoming one of the biggest box office flops in cinematic history.

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

Spoilers for Stealth to follow.

The plot of “Stealth” unfolds in the near future, but every technological innovation advocated by the main characters of the film is completely against logic. Sci-fi jargon is used quite extensively, but the moment you really start thinking about the sci-fi concepts of the film, they fall apart like a house of cards. The experts behind this innovation are fighter pilots Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Cara Wade (Jessica Biel) and Lt. Henry Purcell (Fox) who have been selected for a prestigious program in the US Navy. The program in question has developed the F/A-37 Talon, a single-seat fighter-bomber with improved individual performance, where the next step is to install an artificial intelligence called “Extreme Deep Invader” (EDI) to further optimize this invention. .

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the premise, which seems pretty ordinary by dystopian sci-fi standards. if what autonomous AI concept (similar to the one in Mission: Impossible – Fallout) “teaching” empathy, morality, and insight into groups of human pilots could easily be shaped into something complex and thought-provoking. Still, Stealth lets its human characters down by making them superficial in a way that belies its serious subject matter. Moreover, every mission they do together—including the one where they miraculously fly to Rangoon for a indeed short time and come up with an illogical plan of salvation—stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief. Nothing Gannon, Wade and Purcell do or say feels like anything that would actually happen in real life, and that feeling is maintained throughout.

You might be wondering, “Sure, Stealth is a little uninspired, but is it fun?” Unfortunately, this is not the case, even in the moments where the characters allow themselves to be frivolous during their trip to Thailand to avoid breaking the rules they have committed. In the end, all the expensive marketing that went into promoting Stealth as the big summer blockbuster of 2005 was for naught. The film did not have enough juice or substance to claim such a title.