Release Date: April 16, 2003
Studio: MGM
Director: Paul Hunter
Screenwriter: Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris
Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Seann William Scott, Jaime King, Mako, Marcus Jean Pirae, Karel Roden, Victoria Smurfit
Genre: Action
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for violence, language and some sexual content)
Official Website: MGM.com/BulletproofMonk

Plot Summary: The Monk (Yun-Fat) is a Zen-calm martial arts master whose duty has been to protect a powerful ancient scroll. Faced with finding the scroll's next guardian, the Monk's quest brings him to New York City where, to his disbelief, it appears his successor is a smart mouthed pickpocket named Kar (William Scott). Kar's a charming, street-tough wild card who enjoys his life of no responsibility. As the Monk instructs Kar the unlikely duo become partners in protecting the scroll from a power-monger who's been chasing it for 60 years. Amidst high-flying acrobatics and martial arts action, this comical odd couple has to work together to keep the scroll -- and mankind -- safe

Review by Peter Veugelaers © 2003
- You'll need a survivor pack

 It is a sorry state for Bulletproof Monk when philosophical elements of a story, usually interwoven throughout the script, make the headlines in what looks like a Buddhist-evangelical tract. It is the kind of tact that films like The Omega Code and Left Behind took on their side to influence for the good of mankind. Instead of engaging the audience by moving and coxing them, you come away from this ho-hum martial arts flick with a stronger than-usual impression that there is a blatant message in there for us to take home and ponder, more heavily expressed than your average narrative allows. It is patronising, but with the presence of Chow Yun-Fat in the title character the effect could be disarming.

 There are various fighting action sequences in this - the playing up of martial arts in modern-day mainstream films is becoming a tad tiresome (Cradle 2 The Grave, The Matrix, Charlie’s Angels, ad infinitum) - interspersed between Yun-Fat’s radiant smiles of compassion and words of Buddhist ideology, which on the surface are hardly offensive, albeit positive, if it weren’t for a shoddy and contrived story executed without a resilient edited and cinematographic muscle; the technique is second-rate.

 If the philosophy is thickly textured in gooey amounts then the story could have done with some of this attention. As the story unfolds, it becomes a play on the Raiders of the Lost Ark formula where Nazis also seek the sacred artefact to dominate the world.

 The opening is a story in itself, which is really full of drama in essence but not in the outworking of its five or more minutes. This could have been similar to Seven Years in Tibet if they had outworked the beginning into a feature script. There is conflict - war and Nazism set around a Buddhist community - and there is political intrigue, Tibet being what it is. But this is an actioner with a moral rather than an epic; the latter might have had more potential. The rest of the film is pure bunkum: a nonsense plot with a basic unsustainable main story-line surrounded in a cartoon form that is mostly disengaging.

 Characters are patched into the story like cardboard cut-outs, with one appearing for a couple of sequences then disappearing for the rest of the film. It’s a patchy job at best and even Yun-Fat doesn’t pepper proceedings much if you can look beyond his charm.