Taylor Hackford's Ray, the 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" emerges as a soulful, spiritual drama because of Jamie Foxx's central performance, which oozes charisma. Fox fades into the role of the titular boundary-pushing artistbringing the man's eccentricities to life to convincing ends. The success of "Ray" can undoubtedly be attributed to Fox, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in the film. In addition to being nominated in more than five Oscar categories, "Ray" also won the Oscar for Best Sound Mixing (which is clearly deserved).

"Ray" is not the only film about show Fox's amazing ability to embody dramatic rolesbut it definitely helped cement his credibility as a performer in conjunction with Collateral. The latter, directed by Michael Mann, also came out in 2004 and features an interesting (not to mention Oscar-nominated) performance by Fox, who holds his own against Tom Cruise as the film's intense, sadistic antagonist. One would hope that Fox could keep his hot streak going, but unfortunately, his first post-Ray film was both a critical and commercial failure that ended up becoming one of the biggest box office flops in cinematic history.

This maligned project was Rob Cohen's Stealth, a Top Gun-esque sci-fi film that centers on 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" takes place in the near future, but every technological innovation advocated by the film's central characters completely defies logic. Sci-fi jargon is thrown around quite liberally, but the moment you really start to think about the film's sci-fi concepts, they collapse like a house of cards. The experts advocating such innovation are fighter pilots Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) and Lt. Col. Henry Purcell (Fox), who have been selected to be part of the prestigious US Navy program. The program in question developed the F/A-37 Talon, a single-seat fighter-bomber with improved, customized features, where the next step is to install an artificial intelligence called "Extreme Deep Invader" (EDI) to further target this invention. .

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the premise, which feels pretty far-fetched by dystopian sci-fi standards. If anything, the concept of autonomous artificial intelligence (similar to that in "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning") "Learning" empathy, morality and discernment from a group of human pilots can easily be shaped into something complex and thought-provoking. However, Stealth misses its human characters by making them shallow in a way that feels at odds with the selfless theme at hand. In addition, every mission they do together - including the one where they miraculously fly to Rangoon within the indeed short time and come up with an illogical rescue plan - stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief. Nothing Ganon, Wade, and Purcell do or say ever feels like something that would actually happen in reality, and this feeling persists throughout.

You might be asking yourself, "Sure, Stealth is a little uninspired, but is it fun?" Unfortunately, that's not the case, even in the moments where the characters indulge in some cunning during the trip to Thailand to escape all the rule-breaking they've done. In the end, all the expensive marketing that went into promoting Stealth as the big summer blockbuster of 2005 was wasted. The film lacked both the juice and the substance to deserve such a title.