If you’d want to know if I had taste in movies when I was a kid, all you’d have to do is ask me, “Did you like ‘Bulletproof Monk?’” I would say, “Yes.” There, you would have your answer. Re-visiting this film at least 12 years later, I question my taste because of the first scene alone, where the main character, simply Monk (Yun-Chow Fat)—credited as Monk-With-No-Name on the IMDb credits—battles with his master on a small bridge. They use sticks and dodge left and right, jumping all over. The green screen is hideous, the stunts are weak and the editing is worse. Right then, my nostalgia for it was already out the window—I knew I was in for a bumpy ride. And I had no seat belt.
The film starts with Monk in 1943 Tibet as his master gives us exposition that these monks have protected the Scroll of the Ultimate for a long time. The Monk’s master says that whoever reads the scroll in its entirety will “gain the power to control the world and turn it into a paradise or a living hell.” With this line, the film cements itself as the type of story where the heroes should simply destroy the Scroll. But nope, instead we get a boring tale where Nazis, again, chase ancient artifacts.
60 years later, because after 60 years the bad guys always hone in on the Scroll and are about to strike, Monk has to hand over the Scroll to someone new. He’s now in New York City and handpicks a street hustler named Kar (Seann William Scott), who thinks could be the next to protect the Scroll. I like Seann William Scott but he’s so boring because the character is awful. Kar lives above a Chinese movie theatre that shows old kung fu films, and the extent of Kar’s kung-fu training is watching these films in the middle of the night imitating their moves. A little something about Kar, he has chosen this name, as Kar means family in Cantonese. “I figure I didn’t have one growing up, now I’ll never be without [family].” Folks, take notes because this is peak character development. I am not sure how this film did not win an Oscar.
The villains are also awful. They’re an evil 90-year-old Nazi called Strucker (Karel Roden) who is being helped by his granddaughter Nina (Victoria Smurfit). Stucker wants the Scroll so he can be young again, and since he’s a Nazi, he wants to wipe every race but the Aryan race off the face of the Earth. This is essentially “The Matrix” meets “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” as the powers of the Scroll make it like the Holy Grail, with the added bonus of destroying the world. I love the possibilities of immortality, but this film is just brutally boring.
It’s not interesting as Monk teaches Kar ways of enlightenment. The main philosophy here is Monk raising this question: “Why do hot dogs come in packages of 10 but hot dog buns come in packages of just eight?” How did this film not win an Oscar? Kar attempts to solve this riddle throughout the film to no avail, though the answer is obviously capitalism because you must buy two bags of hot dog buns.
Yun-Fat Chow in a scene from “Bulletproof Monk” ( Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer-MGM, 2003).
If the film’s objective is to get you to think about this question, it succeeds. If it’s supposed to fit into the film coherently with any meaning, it fails miserably because it makes no sense. To be fair, much of this film makes little sense as it’s a kind-of superhero film where people dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge more than “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” and Monk teaches Kar how. Monk tells Kar that to manipulate air, all you have to do is believe. Kar argues that the laws of gravity exist. “If you truly believe that they don’t, then they don’t,” says Monk. Sure, Monk. Sure. That’s exactly why a man falls to his death in this film after he falls from a helicopter – simply because he believed in the laws of gravity. What a fool.
The action in this film is so bad because it is so poorly edited. I wrote in my notes that “this editing is just the god-tier of terrible editing.” This would honestly be so much more watchable if the editing was consistently okay. The only scene that has okay edits is a finale fight on a rooftop, and some cool moments during this fight is why the grade is not an F. However, the writing is still god-awful and the dialogue’s almost worse, especially when Mr. Funktastic (Marcus Jean Pirae) opens his mouth. He is a secondary villain who gets mad at Kar for pickpocketing on his turf.
I’ll only tell you one of Funk’s lines but I’ll set the scene. Mr. Funktastic, who looks like a grunge version of Justin Theroux’ character in “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” starts a huge fight with Kar. Jade (played by Jaime King and is Kar’s love interest but is first Funk’s girl) eventually stops the fight because she, quite literally, tells Funk that fighting makes her horny. Funk says, “Oi, lucky for you this bit of crumpet’s begging for some of my Funktastic love.” Hahaha. Man, again, how did this film not win an Oscar?
It’s also just so bizarre that the film makes this elaborate underground subway community created for one sequence and he’s never heard from again. In a film with many strange aspects, this may be the strangest. Jaime King has some downright awful delivery as Jade, though the character is also so weak, shrouded in mystery throughout the film before we’re told her mundane secret in the third act.
Of course, in action movies, the main guy and girl fall in love but it feels unnatural because of the lack of chemistry and because they barely know each other. King does believably show her affection for him when Kar answers the hot dog question. “Life doesn’t go according to plan, so be happy with what you’ve got because you can always get a hot dog,” Kar tells Monk. Jade looks at him like he’s the smartest person in New York City and not like, “What the actual #$*@ are you talking about?” That, my friends, is love.
