Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I’m really curious about this movie. With this and OLD SCHOOL (where he’s got a great cameo) and STARK RAVING MAD and AMERICAN PIE 3, the supposed last in the series, all coming out next year, 2003 could be a real make-or-break moment for Seann Wiliam Scott.
So what did new spy Harvey’s Third Chin think of this Chow Yun-Fat vehicle, where Scott costars opposite the legendary HK action star?
Check it out...
Had the pleasure of seeing what was billed as the first test screening of BULLETPROOF MONK this evening. The film was digitally projected and the audience was skewed heavily male with minorities disproportionately represented. This summary will have SPOILERS.
The film includes the following elements:
1)Kung Fu
2) Wire work
3) Bullet time
4) A tibetan Buddist monk with no name
5) An ancient scroll with the power to unleash all hell on earth
6) A Nazi villain who wants to purify the earth of inferior races
7) A cocky, streetwise New York pickpocket with a charming grin
8) An inexhaustible supply of henchmen dressed in black suits who, no matter how many footchases they know they will be involved in on a given day, insist on wearing shoes with patent leather soles rather than, say, Nikes
9) A street gang that lives in the subways in a self-styled raver club
10) A street gang leader named 'Mista Fuck-tastik'
11) A street gang member who is a beautiful female who is expert in kung fu
12) A street gang member who is a beautiful female who is expert in kung fu who turns out to actually be the rich daughter of the baddest Russian Mafia boss in all New York.
13) A Gernan/Nazi granddaughter (of aforementioned Nazi lunatic) who also knows kung fu and who also would like to cleanse the earth of lesser races.
14) A secret laboratory located in the sewer systems.
15) A mind-reading device developed by proto-nazis in WWI.
So, as you can see, this is a film with everything. It is about a monk with no name played by Chow Yun Fat who inherits the duty of protecting a sacred scroll whose words, if uttered, have the power to bring destruction to the world. Just as the monk is given the duty of protecting this scroll in the autumn of 1943, a Nazi panzer unit, hoplessly off course, shows up in Tibet, immediately realizes the power of the scroll and attempts to steal it. Monk With No Name, after beating them like egg yolks, manages to escape.
We pick him up 60 years later (he has not aged because of the power of the scroll) in New York where he is in the habit of saving people. Cross-cutting, we also meet Kar - which means 'Family' in Cantonese - played by Seann William Scott, who is a good-natured pick-pocket. While Kar is being chased by the police and Monk With No Name is being chased by CIA-like bad guys, the two happen to run into each other (literally) and after pausing to jointly save a young girl who happens to be stuck on the subway tracks, they form the beginnings of a grudgning relationship. But not before Kar steals the scroll from Monk With No Name.
Kar is then himself kidnapped by an underground street gang and taken to their underground lair which resembles a rave to meet the titular leader of said gang - Mista Fuck-tastik. Kar proceeds to prove his metal by using his Kung Fu to kick all of their asses. He meets his match, however when he faces down the sexy Jade - played by James King - who turns out to be even better at wire fu than Kar is. A bond is formed. He steals her necklace - a gift from her mother. Since he beat all their asses, Mista Fuck-tastic agrees to let him go as long as he agrees to stay off their turf. He does and it turns out that in true True Romance fashion, Kar lives over a movie theater that specializes in chop suey films, thus explaining why he's so good at Kung Fu. We get to see him practicing kung fu - imitating the moves he sees on the grainy big screen. Monk With No Name shows up. Apparently, Monk With No Name is on a quest to find the person who will inherit the responsibilty for the scroll from him and he sees promise in this young pickpocket he happened to run into in the subway. Kar tries to use his kung fu to convince Monk With No Name to leave his apartment but Monk With No Name opens a can of wire fu on his ass and Kar has to let him stay.
From there, the unlikely pair is pretty much inseperable - mostly because Monk With No Name insists on following him around. The next day in the street they havppen to run into Jade. They chat. It turns out that Jade speaks fluent Chinese. Then some CIA types come chasing after Monk With No Name and everybody runs. While they are running, they happen to run into the undergound street gang too. Monk With No Name does some Wire Fu and shoots the fellows pursuing him in the arms while standing on top of a car. They go to a Buddist temple where Kar meets some of Monk With No Name's Buddist buddies. Everyone bonds. In the meantime, Jade goes to an art exhibit detailing crimes against humanity and starts an argument with the hot blonde chick running the show. She senses there is something evil about this woman. It turns out in fact, the hot blond chick - played by Victoria Smurfit - is actually the granddaughter of the crazed Nazi from Tibet who is now a crazed old Nazi living in high style in New York surrounded by some of the nicest liquid crystal screens I've ever seen. They are on a mission to finally locate that scroll so he can get eternal youth and cleanse the earth of inferior races. His hot granddaughter is the lead henchman in this effort.
What follows is a series of chases, then fights, then escapes. In the third act, Kar and Monk With No Name escape New York on a tug boat, but all of Monk With No Name's Buddist buddies are captured by the hot Nazi granddaughter and taken to an underground lab located in the sewers where the crazed Nazi, now dressed in his old Nazi uniform again for effect, sucks the information as to Monk With No Name's whereabouts out of their brains with a mind-reading device built by Nazi's in WWI before they were actually called Nazis. These monks don't actually know where Monk With No Name is but since all Buddists vibrate according to the same universal harmonics, the crazed Nazi is able to get a picture of Monk With No Name crouching outside a gate with a street address from out of their brains and onto his computer screen.
Monk, as it develops, is with Kar at Jade's house - a palatial mansion, because, as it turns out, while by night she is an ass-kicking gang member, by day she is the daughter of the baddest Russian mobster in New York. It might also be worth mentioning, that prior to entering the house, Monk With No Name has taught Kar how to walk on air. Unfortunately, the Germans show up in Chryslers and shoot the place up. Kar and Jade escape but Monk With No Name's bullet-time techniques fail him and he is struck by a sleep-inducing dart and captured. He is taken to the Nazi's underground lair where the Nazi granddaughter, though she is a racist, cannot resist his Buddist machismo and tries to rape him. He resists her, disgusted by her thirst for power. This angers her. The crazed Nazi grandfather reads the words from the scroll and becomes young and powerful. But the last verse has been memorized by Monk With No Name, leaving the crazed Nazi no choice but to suck it out of his brain with the WWI device. As he does this and becomes stronger and stronger, Jade and Kar show up with her street gang. Jade figured out where the secret lab was because her father once told her it was 'best to hide in the last place people would think of looking for you' and what better place for perpetrators of some of the worst crimes of humanity to hide than in the sewers underneath an exhibit condemning crimes against humanity - an exhibit which she coincidentally visited that very morning. Her street gang has now been converted to the cause of good and, armed with spray paint and a soccer ball with which they create booby traps for the nazi henchmen, they assault the sewer/lab. A spectacluar sequence that resembles the end of Tomb Raider or Temple of Doom ensues where the nazi, now a super-nazi, battles both Kar and Monk With No Name with both Kung and Wire Fu. He is ultimately defeated by Jade however, who electrocutes him. Just when you think the movie is over, however, he revives and tries to shoot Monk With No Name with his luger. But Monk With No Name dodges the bullet and Kar dodges some bullets too and kills the nazi once and for all with one final super-kick. Kar and Jade are given joint/custody of the scroll and go off together. We are left with the sense that they will likely fall in love.
Okay, obviously it's a sort of Austin Powers type plot but it's not executed that way. In fact, unless it's just my imagination, it takes itself quite seriously for the most part. Clearly some moments of banter between Fat and Scott are played for humour but the action and plot actually seem to executed entirely soberly - much like the balance in a buddy movie like, say, Lethal Weapon. The audience wanted to like the picture and chuckled quite a bit during the first half hour - but that faded away after they realized that they were doing most of the work. If I were to presume to give a single piece of advice to the filmmakers it would be to strive to make this film even more absurd than it already is. In other words, right now, if this is a parody, it's an inside joke. Go for it - make this thing as light and funny as humanly possible because there's no way you're going to make it serioius at this point. Also, there's little doubt that - at 110 minutes - the filmmakers are already well aware that 15-20 minutes need to come out.
Technically - it's a funny thing about hiring video and commercial directors to execute feature films. It's plain why it's done. The market is such that films are engineered around the opening weekend now. The competition is just too fierce to hope - much less bank on - anything beyond that. But an opening weekend is something the studios can take to the bank IF they put a certain minimum number of dollars behind P&A AND they can cut a cool looking trailer out of it. So enter the fellow who specialize in creating cool images - i.e. the commercial director. Unfortunately, as has been proven over and over again with few exceptions, these fellows generally don't get story. But we can't blame that on Paul Hunter in this case because he was undoubtedly saddled with this script by powers well beyond the scope of his influence. But the curious thing about this film, as opposed to, say, a Michael Bay film, is that - story and geography aside - I can't recall a single 'cool' image. Not one. It appeared to me to all be very bland, uniterestingly shot, poorly staged, blocked and framed. Watching the film, it appeared almost like a film shot in a very short period of time allowing for only the broadest coverage. But still, it should have yielded at least a few memorable images. If they were there, I didn't see them.
Aside from the things that are immutable - plot, etc. - I don't want to go out of my way to say anything bad about this film because it is a work in progress and will definitely get better from here in terms of cutting, pacing, story, performance, etc., but from what I saw tonite, the action the core attraction of a film like this - looked pretty bad. I personally don't like wire-fu - with the notable exception of the Matrix where it was part of the story and I loved it - but the only thing worse than wire-fu is bad wire-fu and, I have to say - apologies to the filmmakers - I've seen it all and this is some of the worst wire-fu I've ever seen. Just awful. Additionally, the fights were pretty dully choreographed and, to my mind, badly shot and, in some cases, inadequately covered - to the degree that there were noticeable gaps in the action. I really think that the Wachowskis are the only ones working today who know how to stage and shoot action.
In terms of acting, Fat is pleasant but fairly one-note on the whole. Scott veers from annoying to charming, to funny and back to annoying again. James King, well she far outshone everyone else in the film in terms of acting. She actually managed to elevate a pretty thankless part (I mean, the poor thing was saddled with lines like (to Kar) "I've never seen anyone stand up to Mista Fuck-tastic before. That was so courageous." . I can easily see her doing serious drama in the near future and doing it well. Her only problem is that she cannot convincingly fight at all. Her wire-fu is ... oh god ... so bad. Victoria Smurfit is fun - very pretty, chews the right amount of scenery for the role and, surprise, actually showed some real athletic ability in her fight with King - by far the most convincing fighter of the two. In terms of fighting, Sean Scott, while looking like he may have had some martial arts background is still not convincing enough. Despite all of Seagals faults, when he did it on screen you believed it - you don't believe Scott (shot differently, you might have though). It feels like you're watching one of those fellows from 90212 doing a kung fu film. Of course, the scenes of him practicing shirtless to old chop suey films doesn't help the poor guy's cause much either.
Other than that, what can one say other than I look forward to this film improving. The filmmakers are clearly stuck with many things like the outlandish plot and the poor and cheap-looking production design but with judicious editing, some pick-ups on the fights and digging through the B-neg for anything that might lend some self-deprecating humour to the piece, it's conceivable that the film could be transformed. I look forward to seeing it again in the theater and being, once again, pleasantly surprised and amazed by the miracle of editing and post-production.
A presto!
Harvey’s Third Chin is right. Guys who know how to shoot action are increasingly rare these days, and when we have vehicles for action like this, it’s imperative that the directors know what they are doing.
So what did this next spy think?
Hey, Harry - first time caller, long time listener.
So I go on a date last night, I'm low on cash, I managed to get free passes to some flick called "SILVER BULLET" which, from the description, sounded like one of those Miramax Hong Kong pick-ups dubbed into English. We get to the theater and it turns out we're actually going to see a test screening of this new Chow Yun Fat flick, "Bulletproof Monk"! Usual yadda-yadda upfront, rough cut, temp music, special effects aren't finished, etc, etc, then the movie starts...
Big Kung Fu fight between Chow and some other chinese dude on a rope bridge in Tibet, circa 1943. Pretty cool, Old School style HK Kung Fu. Then onto some mystic stuff about a super powerful Scroll and Chow being the new protector - then a Nazi Attack! Chow escapes with the Scroll, the Nazi Leader(that crazy Russian dude from "15 Minutes") is pissed then the movie suddenly flashes forward to Present Day & we meet Sean William "Stiffler" Scott as a pickpocket being chased by some cops and Chow, still looking the same only it's 60 years later, being chased by some more Nazis. The two guys cross paths and basically end up teaming up to protect the Scroll from the very same Nazi A-hole who was after it in WW 2 and has been chasing Chow for all these years...
So a couple big things in this flick. First off, Chow Yun Fat is funny. Yep. This dude who hasn't cracked a smile in any of his movies that I've seen is actually charming and pretty cool and hysterical in this movie. He and Stiffler have great chemistry together and they end up doing a sort of "karate Kid" Master/Student thing - only Chow is much cooler than Pat Morita.
The second big thing is that Stiffler is actually a pretty damn entertaining and convincing action hero. He's got that early-Harrison Ford-Indiana Jones-Han Solo charming wise-ass thing going and he actually looks like he might really know Kung Fu.
Other highlights include the delectable Jamie King as a Gang Chick that Stiffler hooks up with, some hot Blonde Nazi Bitch who's the original Nazi's granddaughter, some killer action scenes, lots of humor, a little romance and a couple of surprising twists and turns in the plot.
While this film did not get me past 1st base with my date, it did get me a second date and made for a fun, enjoyable evening out. A lot of these types of movies don't appeal to the ladies(my ex used to give me a dirty look and roll her eyes every time I rented a Steven Seagal or Jet Li flick)but my date dug Chow, Stiffler and the sexual tension/romantic sparks between Stiffler and Jamie King. She also thought it was sort of Spiritual - in between the laughs and the fighting, of course. Once the final effects are in, final editing, etc, this looks like a good little kick-ass popcorn flick with some memorable characters and a cool storyline. Definitely the best of Chow Yun Fat's "Made in the USA" flicks and a real eye-opener when it comes to Sean Scott's action movie potential!
Two thumbs up!
Dude, you can’t put your own thumbs up twice. It doesn’t work like that. Besides, Roger Ebert’s going to send his legal team after you if you run around using that phrase. Why not just say, “LET’S GET READDDDDDDY TO RUMMMMMMMMBLE!!!”? I mean, if you’re going to have open war declared on you just for your summation, let’s live it up in the meantime, right?
Let’s see what our last reviewer thought this morning...
Hey, Harry.
I've sent you a few quasi scoops in the past (just trailers and whatnot) that you haven't used but this is the first time I've sent you an actual review. But let me just say you guys rock and give em hell. Those Matrix posters are kick so much ass.
Getting back to the review, I got to go see Bulletproof Monk at a test screening last night (they called it Silver Bullet on the flier) right here in scenic downtown Chatsworth (well, it's the downtown of industrial parks). I knew going in that it had the potential to kick ass, being that God of Action Chow Yun-Fat was in it. I liked the title. Seann William Scott was in it and the oh-so-fine model stylings of James King.
I'd like to say first off that Chow does not disappoint and remains suave as he wails on the asses of good and bad guys alike. He is great in this movie, and played off Scott really well, and there are literally three or four wild EXTENDED action sequences with hand-to-hand combat, lots of bullets, helicopters, huge satellite dishes exploding, chick fights, wire fu, the whole nine. The ending was all wrong though, which I'll explain. By the way, there are mucho spoilers in this review.
We first meet Monk in 1940's kicking the first in a series of asses as he performs the final trial at a Chinese monastery where he's about to become the keeper and protector of an ancient Scroll. The Scroll contains power and immortality, as whoever keeps it doesn't grow old and has power to change the world. So naturally the Nazis are also after it, specifically a nasty commandant who shoots Monk off a cliff.
The movie then jumps to New York in the here and now (60 years later and time to find a new protector of the Scroll) and we meet Karr (Seann William Scott), a pick-pocket who seems to be able to get out of anything. Both of them are chased into the subway (Monk by FBI types and Karr by the cops) and end up meeting up while trying to save the same girl who fell on the tracks. But Karr picks Monk's pocket, taking the scroll.
After they part ways, Karr gets the crap beat out of him by James King and a gang of pick-pockets whose leader is Mister Fucktastic (yes, that's his name - he even has it tattood on his chest). Of course, Monk shows up and watches Karr turn it around, scaring the shit out of Fucktastic's whole crew. Monk follows him home (an apartment above a Chopsocky movie theater) where he tests Karr's abilities while munching on a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. Only Chow could pull this stunt off. He decides to stick with Karr, believing he may be the next protector. And it's a good thing he has backup because it turns out that the old Nazi Commandant is still after the scroll with his granddaughter Nina as his main henchman. I really dug Nina, an icy cold ringer for Ilsa the Wicked Warden. As Monk is training Karr in a warehouse, Nina's goons descend on the place in an armed to the teeth blackhawk helicopter, chasing them to the roof, where Monk jumps onto the helicopter and fights it out in the cockpit while Karr dodges bullets and falling machinery (satellites), eventually getting dragged off the building by a cable and hanging by a thread. Karr drops the scroll and Nina takes it back to her grandpa. Things get hairier after that, Monk and Karr find out that James King's character is more than meets the eye when they go to hide out at her huge mansion. But of course, Nina/Ilsa is on their tale and coming in for the kill.
It ends with the final showdown at a Museum exhibit where Nazi atrocities are shown as some kind of tribute to humanity (but run by Nazis, go figure). Thematically, the ending was perfect, but the ACTION in the ending didn't fly. It was a let down. I expected it to be Monk and Karr bringing the Nazi scum to their knees, but Monk is immobilized through half of it and you don't want Chow immobilized. I hope they fix that because otherwise, it was really well done action (my compliments to the director and fight coordinator) and basically kicks mucho ass.
This was a rough cut screening and some of it had filler and unfinished effects. They told us this was a digital print but I couldn't really tell the difference except that some of the skies and backgrounds looked fake. The music was interesting. I'm not sure if it was the original score or a temp track, but some of it felt like Raiders of the Lost Ark with stuff like White Zombie and some other KROQ type beats played loud during the action.
All in all, I would definitely recommend Bulletproof Monk to pretty much anyone, but especially to Chow Yun-Fat fans to see him have some fun in an American made film much better and more suited to him than The Replacement Killers.
If you use this call me Hard Boiled Killa. (yeah right)
Thanks, guys. Nice first look at what we won’t get a real peek at until next year.
"Moriarty" out.
