Photo courtesy of Dreamworks Jackie Chan kicks up a storm in the new movie "The Tuxedo," which opens Friday. Chan's stunts, which he usually performs himself, are replaced by computer-generated images. Official Movie Website: The Tuxedo

Expectations for "The Tuxedo" are very simple, and you'd think, very easy to satisfy. All the "writers" need to provide is a skeleton plot in which bad guys and good guys fight over something, propelling Jackie Chan through as many situations as possible where he can display his incredible abilities to hit, be hit and interact in martially artistic ways with everyday objects.

This is all anyone wants from Jackie Chan movies, on whose posters his name is almost always larger than the title. Chan is the centerpiece, the whole reason for shelling out the price of admission. It certainly has never been for any other reason, except maybe to see Chris Tucker's comedy in the "Rush Hour" movies, but Tucker is nowhere to be found this time.

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Instead, somehow, there's Jennifer Love Hewitt. She looks a lot like one of the ladders or broomsticks Chan usually climbs on or jumps through, but unfortunately she's only his co-star.

What's most disappointing about "The Tuxedo" is not the embarrassing plot or the so-so special effects, but that they actually replace Chan's stunt work.

Believe it or not, Chan's stunts are almost all computer-generated, making him look like a cartoon Gumby more than like one of the most skilled stunt men ever. Not that the stunts are that cool anyway. It's as if someone who had never heard of action movies walked in and started directing the animators to do things like "make him flip or something."

A lot of them are even things Chan can actually do ö in fact he may be the only person on Earth who could actually do them ö but the producers chose to CGI it instead. Why would they do that? Does he have an injury we don't know about? Maybe the budget was too big.

The plot is ludicrous. It starts out OK, everything's fine, it's even pretty funny. Chan's character, Jimmy Tong, starts chauffeuring for a super-smooth super spy named Clark Devlin, and then Devlin is injured in an assassination attempt. Jimmy decides to wear Devlin's high-tech tuxedo, shyly taking on Devlin's identity and the superhuman abilities the tuxedo provides.

Then, sometime during a scene in which Jimmy and young agent Del Blaine (Hewitt) are running around some kind of factory trying to evade a handful of thugs, everything falls completely apart. For the rest of the movie, the audience is hard-pressed to figure out what's going on.

Hewitt is disgusting in this movie. She's embarrassing. She's supposed to be a secret agent and she spends the whole movie squealing and tripping in her heels.

Of course, there is one quality scene in which Chan sings a James Brown number and shows off his moves, including some pretty serious booty shaking. But even that degenerates into too much booty shaking, and the moment is spoiled.

No wonder Jackie Chan is always complaining about how he hates working with American movie studios. They're always trying to make his movies suck as much as theirs.