These two appear pretty
confident that their careers
will remain bulletproof, even
after starring in this junk.

Bulletproof Monk
Review written by: Alex Sandell

If you're a fan of the wire stunt type stuff made famous in America by The Matrix, and made famous in Hong Kong dozens of years earlier by dozens of films superior to The Matrix, you will consider Bulletproof Monk to be one of the best films ever made ... for the first ten minutes.  The beginning showdown between Chow Yun-Fat and his mentor on a rope bridge is incredible.  After his victory on the bridge Yun-Fat is declared by his mentor as ready to protect the ancient scroll which can bring absolute power to those able to translate it (did anyone think that maybe this sacred item should be destroyed?). 

The Nazis, always good with their timing and continually looking for magical ancient things, if we are to believe the Indiana Jones movies, arrive just as the baton is passed from the teacher to the student.  The action steps up another notch when the Nazis gun down countless monks in their Aryan pursuit of the scroll.  When The Monk With No Name (Chow Yun-Fat) faces the head Nazi dude and manages to escape, the leader screams over the loss of his all-powerful relic and we flash-forward 60 years to Stifler ... er ... Kar (Sean William Scott) pick-pocketing people to the tune of obnoxious techno music. 

Bulletproof Monk goes from serious action film to sour comedy in under 30 seconds.  The movie is filled with more bad jokes than a Jerry Lewis telethon.  I hate to say it, but these jokes are so rancid they almost make The Sweetest Thing look funny in comparison.  It doesn't help that the delivery is flat from everyone, including, surprisingly enough, William Scott, who should have this cheesy comedy thing down by now.  The film goes from what looks to be a classy high-budget action yarn in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark, to an embarrassing game of guessing which actor's career will suffer the most from starring in a stupid movie with all the depth of The Tuxedo.  For my money, it is Yun-Fat whose star may not shine as brightly as it did before this stinker. 

What was this guy thinking?  You don't need to look any further than films such as Hard Boiled, Full Contact or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to know why Yun-Fat is the most popular actor in the world.  What would make him feel that his next great career move would be in taking a role where he gets to play some sort of clownish parody of himself in a big-budget 100 minute waste of screen space?  Watching him in this film is saddening beyond being merely sad. 

The Bulletproof Junk doesn't stop with Yun-Fat's poor career choice, the flat acting or the horrible dialogue the flat actors are asked to read.  It carries on with Eric Serra's "Marilyn Manson Meets Madonna" computerized original score.  Serra didn't take his year off, after working on 2002's Rollerball, to actually learn how to read and compose music. It sounds as though he spent the entire year playing that tortuous "Die Another Day" tune by Madonna in one ear and Marilyn Manson's soundtrack to Resident Evil in the other. 

A lot of the blame for the tragedy that is Bulletproof Monk belongs on the shoulders of its director, Paul Hunter.  Paul's previous experience behind the camera has been with directing a bunch of really crappy videos for MTV and even crappier ads for crappy corporations.  His directing varies in quality throughout the film, never reaching a caliber higher than that of the latest Janet Jackson video.  He is absolutely clueless when it comes to holding an audience's interest for 100+ minutes. 

Paul Hunter's meandering skill as a director is odd, considering that his last few creations were designed to do nothing but keep a person glued to his or her TV set.  At the same time, it's common to see a commercial or video director, accustomed to creating 5 minute pieces of high-gloss promotional work, not have the foggiest notion of how to keep the slow moments that naturally occur in a full length feature film from putting the audience to sleep.  See (if you are a masochist) David Fincher's debut film, Alien 3, for another example of this pop-culture phenomenon.  In time Hunter's skill as a director may improve in much the same way that Fincher's did, but for now he's too green behind the gills to take on a project of Bulletproof Monk's magnitude.

The one place where the movie does work is with its wire stunts and fight choreography.  Every time a fight breaks out, the film jumps to life like an actor flying gracefully across the stage on a wire.  The battle scenes are peppered with the same putrid jokes that permeate the rest of the movie, and that an amateur comedian on a Public Television fundraiser wouldn't dare to fart out, but they're still amusing to watch and manage to save the film from the very bottom of the creative barrel.  This is unfortunate for the performers, who are most likely already hoping the movie gets stuck so deep in the depths of that barrel that it can never crawl out and remind them of the ghastly mistake they made in the past by taking part in Bulletproof Monk.

On a scale of 1-10?

3

Click a title to check out reviews of this week's other two big releases, Malibu's Most Wanted and A Mighty Wind! 

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