Bulletproof Monkey Poo Flingers
-or-
Dude, Where's My Nunchuk?
Woo hoo! I just came back from seeing Bulletproof Monk with four of my friends: Robby, Lani, her brother A.J., and Justin. Of course it was my idea to schlep them out on a Sunday night, and I even picked them all up.
It was VERY comic booky, to the point of being ridiculously cliched and trite, and we all laughed the whole time, especially during parts that weren't supposed to be funny. I don't know what the comic is like, but I assume nothing like this. It was also directed by Paul Hunter, a big MTV video director who was HUGE a couple years back. No surprise there.
The highlights (lowlights?):
The main guy, Sean William Scott (plays the dumb asshole in every movie, like American Pie or Dude, Where's My Car? or Evolution), learned his martial arts from watching martial arts movies in the old theater where he lives, and practicing along with the screen. He is also a pickpocket and a thief, but he jumps onto subway tracks to save fallen children from getting crushed by trains, and buys hot dogs to give to the homeless.
The girl, Jade, is--get this--the super-wealthy daughter of a Russian mafioso, who lives in a heavily-guarded fortress of a house, yet spends her time going to museum openings by day and hanging out with the gayest gang of thugs ever by night. She is inexplicably also a martial arts master, and keeps a small arsenal in her house, as well as a collection of exotic and deadly reptiles. She also has two fights with the guy that aren't exactly electric with sexual tension and foreplay, but they were supposed to be, a la Daredevil. She was so obviously Elektra, by way of the mall, and her final fight scene even involves a sai.
Chow Yun Fat plays the wise, asexual old monk who speaks in fortune cookie riddles and proverbs, and almost every such statement induced paroxyms of laughter from the audience. I long for him to go back to work for John Woo in Hong Kong and put on a trench coat and twin .45 holsters again.
The lead bad guy is a NAZI war criminal who wants to get a mystic scroll from Yun Fat to grant him youth, immortality, and ultimate power. He is confined to a wheelchair and wears impeccable bad guy suits (from the same tailor as Kingpin and Mr. Glass, no doubt), and sometimes even his old WWII Nazi uniform. He looks like Tim Roth on crack when he turns young, and can toss people around with a wave of his hand, like the Emperor. Or the Red Skull. He also had a secret lair full of indoor moats and eerie blue lighting and Tibetan monks strapped to metal torture devices.
His cold-as-ice granddaughter is a sexy blonde bitch, the museum curator, who inexplicably flirts with Yun Fat while he is shackled (despite thinking him an inferior race), bosses around an army of mercenaries who fly around New York blowing things up with black helicopters, and wears shiny black Nazi-dominatrix-bitch bodysuits, a la the Baroness from G.I. Joe. Actually, she was even more like the evil Nazi archaeologist chick from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The gang from the beginning is one of the worst cliched comic book gangs I've ever seen on film. You know, the unbelievably multicultural gangs of toughs where at least one guy has a mohawk, and at least someone else has a black leather vest with no shirt underneath? This is also the kind of gang that throws parties for themselves in abandoned grafitti-covered subway cars, just so we could have the obligatory "hot, sweaty bodies in a dance club" scene.
The latter fact should not be too much of a surprise, because their leader was "Mister Funktastic." We know this because he refers to himself in the third person, and for the deaf in the audience, he has "Mister Funktastic" tattooed across his Abercrombie and Fitch-model bare chest and abs. But the deaf missed out on his ludicrous party-boy British accent! We could not take anything "Mister Funktastic" had to say seriously, and we were surprised his gang could either. Eventually the rich martial arts expert girl left "Mister Funktastic" to hang out with the heroes, although I couldn't figure out why she was slumming with him in the first place. Maybe he made her laugh. He made us giggle uncontrollably.
Afterwards:
Justin: Well that was six bucks and two hours I'll never get back.
(He surprisingly hated Chicago, but may have been digging "Mister Funktastic.")
Lani: That may have been the funniest movie I've ever seen! And it wasn't a comedy.
(She didn't care for Chicago.)
Robby: The people sitting behind us yelling at the screen were the best part.
(I can see almost any movie with this kid, even the Friday sequels, but he refused to see Chicago.)
A.J.: Whatever.
(Probably took a girl to Chicago and made out with her the whole time.)
Louis: That was SO SWEET! Hey, why are you all looking so annoyed?
I haven't pissed friends off in a movie-related way since I dragged Mike Moskowitz to see Six String Samurai in the theater some years back! And for that, I give Bulletproof Monk not as good a rating as Daredevil, but better than Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.
--Lou
They're lucky they didn't have to sit through that one.
