Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Bulletproof Monk is one of those films that can be enjoyed only be completely detaching your consciousness from your brain, but if you can do that it’s a pretty good film. It stars Seann William Scott as Kar, a pick pocket who learns kung fu from old martial arts films by night, who becomes wrapped up in a plot by some bad guys to steal a scroll that enables anyone reading it to control the world. Guarding this scroll is a nameless monk (Chow Yun-Fat), who knows some pretty nifty moves and, guarded by the power of the scroll, is immune to the aging process. However, each sixty years a new guardian must take over… and the nameless dude’s sixty years is nearly up…

Bulletproof Monk opens with a fight sequence between a master and student monk, which looks completely unrealistic (even notwithstanding the amazing moves they perform), very obviously blue-screen, and looked to me more like a computer game than anything. Still, my wife thinks they were going for the surreal effect, and she may well be right. The whole opening sequence set in China was so completely ridiculous that it just had to be surreal they were aiming for (one can only hope, anyway…) The monk’s search leads him to America, where he finds Kar (Cantonese name, wrongly pronounced), a Human Rights group, and a female who leads two lives, neither of them complete. Stuff like that, all laced with some enlightened wisdom and some not so enlightened foolishness. The woman Kar meets up with an inevitably falls for is a strange creature and one that never made me care at all what happened to her, though at least there is a relatively rational explanation for this later on.

Really this is a is a simple action movie that delivers a few good sequences and a bit of humour. Personally I thought they could have done with putting the emphasis more on the humour than the action, considering the preposterousness of the film’s start. There is quite a bit of wry humour here though, most of it emanating from Chow Yun-Fat, who is clearly enjoying himself enormously. Sean William Scott plays his part well, making you feel that there is a good guy trying to get out, completely opposed to female counterpart Jade ((Jamie King), who was just horrible through and through – well okay, she had one or two scenes where she showed herself to be a decent human I suppose. Contrasting them are Karel Roden and Victoria Smurfit, whose characters I won’t elaborate on to avoid spoilers, but these two are pure evil. There are very few other characters of any note in the film. Overall the acting was pretty good, the scripting fairly mediocre. (Funnily enough I wondered throughout the film what Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson - who teamed up in Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights - would have been like in the roles of Chow Yun-Fat and Seann William Scott. I don’t think they’d have been that dissimilar, though I have a suspicion that they might have been better and more comedic.)

While there were some good scenes however there were some that just left you wondering what on earth had just happened. Not once but twice did a group of supposedly elite martial arts experts (martial artists?!?) simply line up to be shot without so much as a whimper. I mean… why? They could have taken out most of their enemies with probably no more than three or four fatalities on their side, but they didn’t even try!

Overall then, if you can leave your brain in the fridge for a couple of hours, Bulletproof Monk is not particularly terrible, but certainly not a great film. I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you particularly love Chow Yun-Fat or Seann William Scott.

Other Information

Director: Paul Hunter (who according to his page on IMDB has only done music videos apart from this film, which probably explains a lot)
Runtime: 104 minutes
Rating: 12A (UK) PG-13 (USA) – for violence, language, and some sexual content – though there really isn’t a lot of the latter.
Year of release: 2003


Quotes

[Monk puts some ointment on Kar's hand] Kar: Hey, I like this. It's cool. It's comfy. It's fast acting. This stuff is great. What is it? Monk With No Name: Homemade. From my own urine. [Kar sniffs his hand] Kar: That's disgusting!



Monk With No Name: An enlightened man would offer a weary traveler a bed for the night, and invite him to share a civilized conversation over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

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Monk With No Name: An enlightened man would offer a weary traveler a bed for the night, and invite him to share a civilized conversation over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

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Related Links

Jamie King was actually a rather cute nurse in Pearl Harbor

Victoria Smurfit was briefly Hugh Grant’s love interest in About A Boy

See also: Top Ten Movies of 2003


Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older