Bulletproof Monk
My wife asked me, as we left the theater, if I enjoyed Bulletproof Monk. I told her that I did, but I felt guilty for doing so — because Bulletproof Monk is a very silly film that, by any objective standard, is a dreadful movie. I liked it anyway. That does not mean, however, that I do not recognize the silliness that so permeates this cinematic disaster. Allow me to explain:
In the primordial times of the Ancient Ones, when the pyramids of Egypt were constructed, when the Temple of Doom’s various spiked walls and mousetraps and poisoned darts and awkwardly placed sharp-edged coffee tables were loaded and stretched taught and coated and positioned, when various sacred artifacts capable of bestowing godlike powers on human beings were sprinkled throughout the globe in a variety of secret caverns and a menagerie of giant bugs and reptilian monsters and hot women who cast spells or turn people into statues or potted plants were tasked to guard them, said Ancient Ones apparently spent all their free time concocting incredible devices and books and objects for which Mankind Was Not Ready.
You would think, after the third or fourth Object of Ultimate Power was locked away in the care of an immortal protector, it might have occurred to the Ancient Ones what a spectacularly bad idea it is to have so many really, really powerful and dangerous things lurking about. In the Movieverse, that realm in which movies take place, in which roadside bars employ more bouncers than they have patrons, in which jaded, don’t-play-by-the-rules, unshaven cops are routinely partnered with wide-eyed rookies or robots or intelligent animals or Charlie Sheen, scarcely a weekend goes by when a small group of individuals does not preserve the world from being horribly destroyed when some ne’er-do-well gets his greasy mitts on one of these world-destroying old keys or pendants or spheres or staffs or something. It would seem, however, that much as groups of Movieverse teens select for their vacations year after year “that place where all those horny teenagers were disemboweled with pruning shears last year and the year before that,” there is no talking sense to the people in charge of creating these paranormal knickknacks.
Bulletproof Monk is, loosely interpreted, the story of the brave souls who strive to protect one of these Cosmic Liabilities through the centuries.
Chow Yun-Fat, the brilliant dramatic actor and Hong Kong action star whose screen presence lent such gravity to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, plays the Monk with No Name, though to be honest everyone in the film ends up calling him “Monk” and this sure seems like a name to me. As the film opens, it is 1943 or something. We find ourselves on some soundstage somewhere in which some stage hands have built what is supposed to be a temple — the Temple of Really Awful Special Effects, I think it was called. The opening scenes involve a butterfly and Chow Yun-Fat fighting some other Asian fellow — okay, the butterfly does not participate — whereupon Chow Yun-Fat and the Asian Dude (who is Chow’s — Yun-Fat’s? — teacher and whom we’ll call Deadmeat for the sake of this review) fight each other with staffs on top of a fake bridge suspended over a painting of a deep ravine.
Succeeding in flying about, walking on air, dancing on the bridge ropes, and generally thumbing his nose at his teacher Deadmeat, Chow Yun Fat celebrates this momentous occasion by forgetting his name (guaranteeing that people will call him “Monk” for the rest of the movie). Deadmeat transfers the Awesome Responsibility For Guarding This Scroll Thing So Powerful It Could Make The World A Paradise Or Destroy It A Lot (ARFGTSTSPICMTWAPODIAL) to the Monk. It seems Deadmeat has been guarding the scroll for sixty years. The scroll keeps him young, but when he transfers the ARFGTSTSPICMTWAPODIAL to the Monk, Deadmeat ages sixty years in one day — the horrible fate awaiting Dick Clark when he finally fulfills his destiny.
Deadmeat, of course, breaks the Number Two Rule of Surviving an Action Movie (the first rule being, “Never marry the protagonist in the first two thirds of the film”). He announces that his life’s work is complete and he’s going on vacation. He is, of course, machine gunned to death almost before he’s finished uttering the sentence.
The Evil Nazis have arrived, you see. Evil Nazis are a fixture in movies or portions of movies set in the 1930s or 1940s, so it’s no surprise that they pop up here. The head Evil Nazi, a fellow named Strucker (gamely and maniacally played by the otherwise forgettable Karel Roden), proceeds to show us how evil he can be by having his Evil Nazi Henchman work through their aggression issues by shooting several dozen people.
Tibetan Monk’s Local 142 takes it on the chin in what is, apparently, a labor dispute, the solution to which is to machine gun as many harmless union-dues-paying Tibetan monks as possible. Bulletproof Monk has the distinction of being the Movie In Which I’ve Seen More Tibetan Monks Shot Dead Than In Any Other Movie, in fact. I mean, as much as I enjoy a movie where enlightened spiritual adherents who eschew violence and are nice to everyone are pointlessly and repeatedly gunned down, pistol-whipped, or tortured, I couldn’t help but think this was one aspect of the film that could have been toned down slightly.
The Monk fights some Evil Nazis, presumably upset about the machine gunning of Deadmeat (I mean, wouldn’t you be?) and determined to escape with the Scroll the Nazis have come hunting. How the Nazis know about the Scroll and why Strucker is obsessively pursuing it is never really explained. The movie’s producers assume that you and the Evil Nazis have all seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, so Evil Nazis pursuing ancient artifacts that bestow on the owners great powers is just kind of taken as a given. I mean, come on, that’s what Evil Nazi’s spend their time doing in the Movieverse, when they’re not building elaborate torture machines or doomsday devices. The Monk dodges some bullets in Matrix-inspired slow motion, breaks some machine guns (a little late for that, I thought at the time), and eventually gets shot and falls over a fake cliff, presumably disappearing into the painting of the ravine. Apparently catching on to the naming convention, Strucker calls after him, “Monk! Monk!”
(Why would he answer? “Yes, Evil Nazi, I am down here! Please direct your Luger fire thirty degrees to your left and kill me. Thus we will both escape this movie before it begins.”)
The text block announces that it is Sixty Years Later. Ooooh, you’re thinking, sixty years. I bet the Monk will need to find a successor. Someone who is undisciplined yet shows a great deal of potential. What are the chances?
Seann [sic] William Scott, best known as “Stifler” from American Pie, here reprises every role he’s ever played — that of a hapless and allegedly good-looking simpleton who really does mean well and is hard to dislike despite the fact that he has the intelligence of a box of plastic scrubbing pads. Here he plays “Kar,” a character stupid enough to give himself the name “Kar” when there are entire baby name books full of more suitable monikers form which he could have selected.
While Kar is supposed to be hopelessly charming, he is actually quite a dirtbag. He spends the entire movie — even the epilogue, despite the fact that epilogues are known for their freshly-polished-C3PO cleanliness — looking like he needs to bathe, his face and clothes covered in layers of grime that look like sweat mixed with Vaseline sprinkled with asphalt. Every character he meets, however, seems hopelessly charmed by him, seeing in this undisciplined fellow a great deal of potential. What are the chances?
Kar is a pickpocket with a heart of gold. He’s the sort of person who’ll steal your wallet, ruin your credit abusing your cards, screw up your day and cause you endless stress over the loss of what you’ve rightly earned, even if you were on your way to the drugstore to buy insulin with the precious cash tucked away in your wallet — but then, compassionate soul that he is, use some of the money to buy a homeless person a hotdog. What a guy.
Kar becomes mixed up with the Monk in a variety of ways I won’t bother to explain here. Let’s just say that the Evil Suit-Wearing Nazis have been chasing the Monk for sixty years, their particular Evil Nazi Chapter having remained viable even after the end of World War II. Kar helps the Monk escape from the Evil Nazis and then promptly picks the Monk’s jaunty leather purse for the Really Important Scroll. This is not surprising, as Kar’s assistance in evading the Nazis seems to have come primarily in the form of running really fast away from the Nazis, his path sort of coincidentally paralleling that of the Monk’s.
Deep in the subways of whatever city this is supposed to be, the wayward Kar — Really Important Scroll tucked into his jacket — runs afoul of one of those street gangs that live in those abandoned corners of the subway tunnels beneath most cities. (You have these where you live, right?) The gang is run by a bare-chested fellow named — I am not making this up — “Mr. Funktastic” (shirtlessly played by Marcus J. Pirae).
Mr. Funktastic — who has his name tatooed on his chest and really has no grounds on which to make fun of “Kar” — is a hard man with whom to deal. By this I mean that everything about him is hard — his attitude, his pectorals, his abdominals, his nipples. Belligerently pointing his erect nipples at anyone within nipple-pointing range, Mr. Funktastic pretends to be English (with all that his silly accent implies) and firmly believes that the women he encounters are in dire need of his Funktastic Loving. (When he expressed this in the film, my wife and I looked at each other and shuddered. I have not had a similarly disgusted-at-the-movie moment since the Walther-facilitated sodomy of The Delivery.)
Kar fights Mr. Funktastic’s gang, lingering over a Kung Fu brawl with “Bad Girl,” the petite and presumably sexually attractive young lady who, Mr. Funktastic would tell you, wants his Funktastic Loving and wants it badly. We learn later in the film that Bad Girl is actually a young lady named Jade, daughter to imprisoned Russian Mafia figure “Ivan the Terrible.” She lives in a really expensive house, owns a bulletproof SUV, has a closet full of explosives, and spends her evenings in the subways desperately seeking the “street cred” denied her by her family ties. One can only presume that Kung Fu-ing pickpockets trespassing on one’s turf while deftly avoiding the greasy advances of a shirtless, tattooed, erect-nippled Englishman is the path to street credibility we would all choose, if we found ourselves in a similar position.
Kar, ever the gentleman, charms Jade and steals her necklace, escaping the beatdown Mr. Funktastic seems to think he deserves.
There is lots more movie. (If you read a lot of movie reviews, you know the phrase “there is lots more movie” is synonymous with “I’m not going to get into it here.) The Monk shows up at the beautiful loft apartment Kar keeps above the Golden Palace movie theater, a grimy place in which he keeps his grimy clothes and looks at his grimy face in his grimy mirror when he isn’t practicing his grimy Kung Fu moves in front of Kung Fu movies (the feature listed on the marquee is Descendant of Wing Chun, which gave me a chuckle) projected on a grimy screen. You, too, can become a Kung Fu master who bests shirtless erect-nippled Englishmen by watching lots of Kung Fu movies. Come on, we’ve all tried it.
After eating Kar’s cereal (one presumes his Scroll-granted super powers are what keeps the Monk from becoming violently ill after eating anything in Kar’s apartment), the Monk demonstrates that he can kick Kar’s ass and then falls asleep in his bed. Delousing probably follows.
Somewhere in the midst of the lots more movie that follows, Kar and the Monk engage in an impromptu sparring session in one of those Abandoned Warehouses In Which Immortals Practice Swordfighting in the Highlander Movies.
“It’s not about anger,” the Monk says, kicking Kar’s ass. “It’s about peace.”
“It’s not about power,” the Monks says, beating the crap out of Kar. “It’s about grace.”
Meanwhile, in what at first seemed to me to be a completely different movie, the Evil Nazis run some sort of humanitarian foundation downtown. They do this because it is presumably what Evil Nazis of the Present Day would do with their time (“Ve are hiding in plain sight, you see,” they would utter menacingly, smoking cigarettes held in long black holders.) Of course, it was never a secret that the Evil Nazis run this place, because when we first see it the tall blonde woman in charge is quite obviously one of those tall blonde Evil Nazi Henchwomen who changes into skintight clothing and high-heeled boots to engage in sapphic girl-on-girl fights charged with sexual tension. You see her and you think, “She’ll take her hair down, change clothes, and be working with the Evil Nazi Strucker, who is probably really old and who uses the organization as a front for his hunt for that scroll thing.”
Well, you’d be right. The Evil Nazis do a lot of chasing and shooting. At one point they kidnap a few of the lesser monks with whom the Monk has hooked up in this city. The lesser monks are a little upset that the Monk has chosen the crooked-smiled, grimy Kar as his successor, so it’s perfectly understandable when one of them gives in to Scroll envy, but that’s not really an important plot point. (There are no important plot points in Bulletproof Monk.) All this business culminates in the Evil Nazis being forced to interrogate a few captured lesser monks, and eventually the Monk himself. As you would expect, they use their Rube Goldberg Evil Nazi Mind Probing Machine.
Now, let me tell you something about Evil Nazis. These are people with a lot of time on their hands. These are people who enjoy elaborate, complicated machinery. As the Evil Nazis in this particular film are seeking an artifact that will allow them to rule the world and transform it into Evil Nazi Paradise, they have not spent their time constructing what Evil Nazis usually would create in their spare time — that is, weather machines, or devices that cause earthquakes, or satellites with powerful lasers in them capable of scorching the Earth, or large self-propelled drills that can pierce the Earth’s core and destroy the world. Taking all that as granted once the Really Important Scroll is theirs, these Evil Nazis have constructed, in an offhand fashion, a Rube Goldberg Evil Nazi Mind Probing Machine.
Technology that enables Evil Nazis or anyone else to suck out the data in a person’s mind would normally be something around which you build an entire movie, but not where Evil Nazis are concerned. They are unimpressed with these devices, incidental as they are to their overarching goals. “Oh, zat sing? I just threw zat together. It iz but a component in my eeeevil plans.” This is one hell of a machine, too, with lots of flat screen monitors displaying colorful but useless graphics, chairs that move on tracks and lift into place, horrible electricity sounds, extending electrode things that leave embarrassing red marks on people’s heads… It’s quite impressive, in an “I can’t believe the Evil Nazis Have a Complicated Mind Probing Machine” kind of way.
The movie having descended to such depths of ridiculousness at this point, I took it for granted that the eventual showdown between the Evil Nazis and the forces of Monk, Kar, and Jade would culminate in a battle between the rejuvenated Strucker (powerful Scrolls in the hands of one’s enemies can be a real pain that way) and the hapless Monk/Kar duo. Jade, meanwhile, has the aforementioned sapphic showdown with the Evil Blonde Nazi Woman, who has changed into appropriate clothing for the encounter and does her best to Nazi-Kung-Fu Jade into unconsciousness.
Mind you, none of this takes place before what I can only describe as one of the creepiest James Bond Ripoff Interrogation Sexual Tension scenes imaginable, in which the Evil Blonde Nazi Woman speculates, while disrobing a captive Monk, as to how far down his body tattoos go before scanning his naked body with a portable scanner. (The only way this could have been more revolting is if she’d been trying to scan Mr. Funktastic.) The movie also violates one of the cardinal rules of Happy Endings for Movies, which is that you never, ever kill Mako, particularly if he plays a kindly Asian curmudgeon who dispenses kindly advice in his own gruff but kindly manner.
This often indecipherable, bizarrely plotted, strangely executed exercise in poor special effects, timeworn clichés, and guilty pleasure (for I really did enjoy the movie immensely) flips, kicks, slaps, and stumbles to a halt when evil is defeated, Kar and Jade affirm their lust for each other, and the Monk transfers the ARFGTSTSPICMTWAPODIAL to the both of them. It seems that the Monk has been jumping through logical hoops to manipulate his interpretation of certain prophecies so he can justify declaring that Kar and Jade have fulfilled them. One can only hope that they don’t break up any time in the next sixty years, as that’s going to make the whole Scroll business really, really awkward.
His rhetorical feat completed, the Monk transforms into Chow Yun-Fat wearing a lot of makeup intended to make him look old. When Kar and Jade tell him to enjoy his vacation, I braced myself for the hail of gunfire I thought sure to result.
Would you do any less?