It isn't every evening I get to see a movie whose
first lines of dialogue are spoken in Tibetan--subtitled in English, needless to
say. Bulletproof Monk, directed by Paul Hunter, commences in 1943. After a
brief martial arts demonstration that takes place on a bridge stretched over a
Himalayan chasm and that serves as as an overture to the main action, the abbot of a Buddhist monastery hands over its direction to
his younger successor (Yun-Fat Chow), who has just given up his name as a
condition of assuming this post. At the same time, the elder monk bequeaths to the
younger a scroll with magic powers.
No sooner has the this transmission of power occurred, however, than a bunch of
Nazis arrive on the scene, demanding the scroll. The film never explains where
these SS Männer, who look like they've been sent on a mission by Central
Casting, came from, but their Sturmführer, the poisonous Strucker (Karl
Roden) has no doubt what he's
after.
When Strucker demands the scroll, the monks refuse. He
then resorts to more forceful tactics, and storms into the monastery. But the
abbot's successor has already taken it. Strucker pursues him; the monk flees to the
edge of a precipice; Strucker fires on him, and the monk descends into the void below,
apparently carrying the scroll with him. The action now jumps sixty years to a
large American city where a sexy young pickpocket (Seann William Scott) is plying his trade at a
subway station. Trying to escape the police, he collides with the monk, who is
still being pursued by agents of Strucker. One thing leads to another, and the monk
realizes the thief is destined to be his own successor. But not only are there
all sorts of obstacles to be overcome--those leftover Nazis are still on the
prowl--first of all, the monk must transform the thief into a more enlightened
being.
Following a familiar convention of Asian action
movies, the monk becomes the de facto guru of the thief. Yet the thief turns out
to be no ordinary criminal, but an orphan who has taken the Chinese name Kar,
and who knows all about martial arts moves from running a movie house called The
Golden Palace, where he shows a fare of Hong Kong martial arts epics.
Nevertheless, Kar is
often a refractory subject, and the cliff-hanging adventures to which he is
subjected during the reminder of the film considerably improve his skills as a
fighter while providing him with a crash course in becoming a prospective
bodhisattva. In reaching this goal, he is aided both by the monk and an
attractive young woman, Jade (Jaime King) the daughter of an imprisoned financier--read Ivan
Boesky--who sizes up Kar's assets pretty quickly.
Like a number of other recent
films--X-Men and
Spider Man to cite only two examples--Bulletproof
Monk, as the end titles inform
the audience, is based upon a comic book published by Flypaper Press and has
been adapted for the screen by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. Since I am not familiar with the source, I am in
no position to judge how much of the screenplay is directly taken from the
original and how much is the invention of Messrs. Reiff and Voris. Under the circumstances, however, it
seems reasonable to judge the screen version on its merits, and unless Reiff and
Voris have transcribed the text of the comic books word for word, they deserve credit for
providing a solid script with sporadic flashes of wit and with plenty of
surprises to keep propelling the action forward. I only wonder who penned the
lines in Tibetan.
Although Bulletproof
Monk's visual style
and lightening editing hail from Hong Kong, its plot is Raiders of the
Lost Ark decked out in Lamaistic regalia, with the magic scroll taking the place of the Ark of
the Covenant. Yet the movie cannot be accused of a lack of
imagination, since it adds a number of interesting touches to the
basic action picture format it employs, starting with making Kar the proprietor
of the Golden Palace. An even more interesting touch is the character of
Nina (Victoria Smurfit),
the granddaughter of Strucker, who provides a front for granddaddy's nefarious schemes
by heading a human rights organization and curating a museum of atrocities.
Nina is no less depraved
than old grand-dad, with a taste for whips, chains, and girls. But in
spite of her blonde Aryan mien, she is no model of Teutonic efficiency. Instead,
she carries on like Myrna Loy as Boris Karloff's daughter in The Mask Of Fu
Manchu, sadistically relishing each moment of pain she inflicts on her
victims. Bulletproof Monk has a PG-13 rating, but it contains a rather
astounding shot in which Nina apparently opens the monk's fly, with a grin that
only be described as obscene.
Bulletproof Monk has the advantage of working in a
genre that has been polished to the last degree by craftsmen like John Woo--whose
name appears on the credits as co-producer--and
Tsui Hark. But the Americans show themselves to be no unworthy practitioners of
the art. In his debut as a director, Hunter and his collaborators have come up with a picture that is a real
model of resourcefulness and economy--virtues not always evident in motion
pictures today. In one striking shot early on, Kar imitates the moves of a
character on screen during the projection of a film at The Golden Palace. In a
certain way, this attempt by a young American to become a martial arts contender
might well serve as an analogy for what Bulletproof Monk itself is trying to do,
although it is by no means the first American made imitation of Eastern action
flicks.Bulletproof Monk is no big budget production by
today's inflated standards, but no one could fault its production values.
The film has been well photographed by Stefan Czapsky, who comes up with some
striking compositions of menacing nocturnal avenues. The no-nonsense editing
is by Robert K. Lambert , and the production design, solid if unexciting for
the most part, is by Deborah Evans. Eric Serra has contributed a score that is
effective but never obtrusive.
The cast is by no
means weak; however, the performers collide head on with the limitations of the
genre. Generally speaking, in movies like this only Heroes and
Villains get the juicy roles, and everyone else is just there to decorate the
set. Bulletproof Monk is sadly enough no exception to the rule. Jaime
King and Victoria Smurfit are quite attractive young women. They might even be
good actresses in different roles and with a different script, but they have
no opportunity to display their talents in this showcase. As the evil Strucker,
Karl Loden is adequate, but no more. He has a propensity to chew up the
scenery which is not justified by his modest abilities--at least as he
displays them in Bulletproof Monk. To be credible, a part like this
requires the talents of a larger than life actor like Armin Mueller-Stahl.
Fortunately, the day
is rescued to a degree by Yun-Fat Chow and Seann William Scott as the dual
heroes. Yun-Fat Chow has so much experience behind him that he is a
positive pleasure to watch. He seems to know quite well how just preposterous his
role is, but he only betrays that awareness by an enigmatic amused smile.
Scott is about as different an actor from Chow as anyone could imagine, nervy and
nervous in a classically American style. But surprisingly, this yin-yang piece
of casting, which could either ignite or fizzle altogether, furnishes a
reasonable blaze to illuminate the action. The pair may not exactly burn with
a hard, gem-like flame like refugees out of The Renaissance, but Scott
serves as an astonishingly apt foil for Yun-Fat Chow.
It would be nonsensical to read more into
Bulletproof Monk than the movie contains. It has its origins in a comic book,
and only a thirteen year old would take seriously pearls of Oriental wisdom
put into the monk's mouth that have all the profundity of a message in a fortune
cookie. Chow Yun Fat is a sage enough performer to deliver these gems with
exactly the right expression on his face, somewhere between dead pan and a
smirk. Bulletproof Monk is no Buddhist fable to be classed with Kon Ichikawa's
The Burmese Harp. Yet like another highly entertaining action movie from last
summer, Rob Cohen's XXX, starring the estimable Vin Diesel, this film
illustrates a fascinating paradox: Why isn't it possible to apply this kind of
talent to a more promising subject?
A glance back over the last five years reveals a
cinematic turf littered with the corpses of dead white elephants. Of
course, it's always possible to find an explanation for this sad state of
affairs. When Michael Bay screws up an assignment like Pearl Harbor that Michael
Curtiz or Delmar Daves--neither one among the first rank of directors in
American cinema history--would have tossed off in the old days at Warner Bros.
with the aplomb
of Rossini penning a minor comic opera, the failure can be chalked up to woefully inept direction. Similarly, when Baz Luhrman's
Moulin Rouge! starts off
as pseudo-Lubitsch and ends up as faux Fassbinder, the problem can be attributed
in part to the difficult status of the musical genre.
But the comparison of a straightforward action
picture like XXX or Bulletproof Monk with more ambitious projects like A.I.,
Minority Report, or Gangs of New York is far more damning--and
far more depressing. It is
difficult to know how a director with such shrewd instincts as Steven Spielberg
could let the last third of A.I. drag on so painfully that watching it becomes a
form of refined torture. Minority Report is, on the surface, a better piece of
film making than A.I., but all the pieces Spielberg has been playing with for
over two hours never come together at the end of the movie. And I would be
willing to bet that only a handful of science fiction aficionados managed
to understand the whole business about the precogs.
The story with Martin Scorsese and
The Gangs of
New York is quite different. Spielberg is
almost the only director working today who
could qualify as an auteur and who also has the ability to make films for a broad
audience--crudely speaking, to occasionally come up with the right mixture of
art and commerce. But Scorsese's most important films like Raging Bull or more
recently Bringing Out the Dead are indubitably the personal statements of an
artist. Although Bringing Out the Dead starred Nicholas Cage, no one could have
imagined that Scorsese expected the picture to be a big hit. If the movie
flopped at the box office, it was not because the director had failed to realize
his intentions, but because he had succeeded all too well. Bringing Out the Dead
is a bona fide art film, and it's difficult to know how much of an audience
still exists for works of that kind.
Yet Scorsese is a good deal closer to mainstream
production in his mastery of the mechanics of putting together a movie. Some
sequences in Good Fellows, for example, could serve as textbook illustrations
in
a film school editing class. But it is just at this level that Gangs of New York
fails. The film is much closer to an old time historical spectacle like W.S. Van
Dyke's San Francisco or Henry King's In Old Chicago than it is to any kind of
art film. But Scorsese doesn't know the tricks that were second nature to
directors like Van Dyke or King, and when he works up to the grand finale that
combines Oedipal rivalry with the Draft Riots of the Civil War, the whole
edifice he's been constructing comes crashing to the ground. Which
leaves us with the melancholy reflection: in the future are we going to be
doomed to choose between ambitious but embarrassingly clumsy movies like Gangs
of New York on the one hand, and perfectly executed
schlock like Bulletproof Monk
on the other?
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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