I'd like to start this review by giving thanks to the 7 people who used my name as a write-in vote during the 2008 Presidential election. Sadly, after a month of rigorous recounts, it still wasn't nearly enough to make me your official Commander-In-Cheese for the next four years, but your support is always appreciated and I hope you'll continue to keep me as your unofficial CoC in your hearts... and maybe your vaginas.

I originally saw today's movie along with my Evil Dead Bride when it first landed in theaters. Unfortunately it wasn't a very good landing and the movie broke its ankle, leading to the flick shortly being put out of its misery with a bullet in the brain and a posthumous field trip to the glue factory. That's right kids, if movies can't find an audience and a box office take big enough to justify their creation, the owners sell them to glue factories in an effort to make up for as much of their lost capitol as they can. That Elmer's you've been covering your hands in so you can play "shedding lizard man" with yourself after a hard day at the rendering plant? Yep, it's made of 90% recycled Hudson Hawk film.

Based on an independent comic book of the same name published by Flypaper Press, this makes my second "indy comic-to-film" review in as many weeks. You can definitely tell that it's a comic book movie too, thanks to music video director Paul Hunter who gives it a very energetic, lively touch. I think the flick also gets a boost with John Woo as one of the producers, who I'm pretty sure is there because of a mystic blood pact forever binding him to be involved in some way with anything that Chow Yun Fat does. You may doubt me, and you may think you have a whole IMDB full of cast listings to the contrary, but that's why George Washington invented the alias... But enough of this, there's movie to be watchin'!

We open in Tibet circa 1943. At the Temple of Sublime Truth, a monk-in-training (Chow Yun Fat) has just passed the last of three sacred tests by defeating his teacher (Roger "Shanghai Noon" Yuan) in combat to prove himself worthy of replacing the old man as the guardian of the Temple's greatest treasure: the Scroll of the Ultimate. I once tried to take my boss's job by kicking his ass, but all it got me was 10 months behind bars on assault charges. Free tip: if you ever want to get off the fryer at the golden arches, don't drop kick the night shift manager and pelt him with urinal cakes from the mens room. Anyway, as part of his graduation into the realm of awesome, our student has to give up his name (not that we're ever privilege to that info to begin with...), so from now on I'll be calling him Monky. As for this "Scroll of the Ultimate", it's kinda like the Arc of the Covenant in that who-so-ever gains power over it will basically wield the car keys to the planet. The artifact's designated guardian also gains eternal youth, at least for the 60 years until it's time for said guardian to seek out their replacement, after which the prior guardian's internal clock goes into overdrive to make up for six decades of hibernation. On the plus side though, this means that guardians get to jump head long into senior citizen discounts, 3 o'clock dinners, and armpit high trousers without all that mid-life crisis crap!

Also like the Arc, the scroll is uber high on the Third Reich's "to do" list of taking-over-the-world chores. It's not long before a gaggle of goose-steppers (geese-steppers?) show up and, in true buddy cop movie style, Monky's master gets gunned down immediately after declaring it's finally time for him to take a vacation... that's right, they pulled the old, "he only had two days left till retirement!" cliche. Bravo. Not one of those heartfelt "BRAVO!"s though, I meant one of those drawn-out, sarcastic "Braaaaavooooo"s. Leading the swastika happy hit squad is Hitler heiling a-hole Strucker (Karel "Hellboy" Roden), who of course orders all of the monastery's occupants ethnically cleansed when they refuse to give up the scroll. I'm pretty sure he would've had them all cut down and dumped into a mass grave anyway, so it doesn't really matter if they gave up the scroll or not. After laying out Strucker's SS posse and living up to his titular moniker, Monky escapes Nazi persecution and 60 years later winds up in New York City being chased by sinister looking characters dressed like Secret Service goons without the shades. He ends up saving a little girl from being turned into a big wet hood ornament on a subway car thanks to a little help from a pickpocket named Kar (Seann William Scott)... who does what sixty years of Nazis have thus far been unable to do and steals the scroll right out of the old man's pocket. I guess the Nazi party (now disguised as a human rights organization) needs to stop recruiting angry, violent, chromosome deficient hate-tards and start dipping into Fagin's talent pool... it's a literary reference... read a motherfuckin' book once in a while! Jeez!

Kar's your typical "troublemaker with a heart of gold" street urchin hero. He's always getting into trouble and either has to bullshit his way out of it or try to fight his way out it using kung-fu movies he learns from watching '70s martial arts flicks at the Golden Palace: an old grindhouse theater he lives and works in for his boss/landlord Mr. Kojima (mono-named movie-legend-in-his-own-right Mako). One such physical altercation finds Kar matching sticks with one of those silly gangs of hoods who resemble a dance troupe dressed like street ruffians for one of those brain cells swallowing movies about city kids who settle their differences with step "battles". Or worse, like the bad guys in a kid friendly '90s fight movie like Double Dragon or Surf Ninjas. Leading these thugs is a corny little Brit who calls himself "Mista Funktastic". You can't really blame him for the shitty street name though, after getting the damn thing tattooed across his chest (likely in a drunken stupor and at the prodding of his jerk-off friends) he kinda has no choice. Otherwise, anytime somebody saw it, they'd assume it was his boyfriend's name and he'd have to go into this hour long tirade trying to convince people that he's not gay... and he's already gotta spend an hour explaining why his fruity haircut doesn't make him gay, so it's best to just preserve many many hours of his time by just going with the name. Either way, anyone who calls their sex "my funktastic lovin'" needs to spend their life sad and alone with no chance of happiness or satisfaction while rats gnaw their toes and maggots set up shop in their small intestines.

While trying to preserve his balls from Funky's nut hungry crew, Kar catches the eye of the boss's "bird" Jade (Jaime King) and makes off with her fancy necklace while he's at it. Seems Jade's one of those snot-nosed "daddy's little girl" rich brats who likes to slum with the unsavories while Poppa Moneybags is jet-setting across the French Riviera... actually, he's a Russian mafia kingpin serving a 20 spot up the river, but who's counting. From here it's a straight shot to just where you think it's going: Monky tags Kar as the next guardian, Kar and Jade get all cuddly-fighty together, the Nazis make their move and swipe the scroll thus turning an enfeebled old Strucker into Captain Nazi, everybody fights and the heroes win by breaking every law of Physics. The ending turns out to have a decent little twist to it, but you get the picture, I get out of having to write another 5 paragraphs about what's going on here, and we both save a good 10 or 15 minutes of our lives that will be better dedicated to stuff like watching midget wrestling, writing hate mail to Dustin Diamond, or torturing a loved one in a dutch oven. Toasty.

The funny part about Bulletproof Monk is that while I was watching today I thought to myself, "Hmmmm. Hey self? Did you notice how it seems like Kung-Fu Panda might've been more than a little 'inspired' by this movie?". Of course this was before I investigated the credentials of the creators behind it. Hapless hero who imagines himself a martial arts bad-ass, learns his combat techniques through watching rather than training, chosen by prophecy to be the pupil of a reputed master of combat to train in the use of supernatural kung-fu techniques bestowed by a magical scroll that he's destined to protect, only to learn that the true power comes from within himself? Yeah, sounds familiar... cuz both movies were written by the same damn guys. Funny how a live-action box office failure could be recycled 5 years later, slipped into an animated sleeve, given voice by an all-star cast, cleaned up enough for a 'G' rating, and goes on to make a few billion dollars worldwide. I'm looking forward to Dreamworks' next summer blockbuster about a cat burglar (who's an actual feline) that gets out of prison, only to find himself tangled up in a series of wacky events revolving around the Vatican, an alchemy machine created by Leonardo da Vinci, and a team of mercenaries all named after candy bars. He'll love cappuccinos (we'll call them "cat-puccinos"), his partner will be an old bulldog, and the two will sing show tunes during jobs. We'll call it Cat Burglar Cat and it'll feature the voices of Jason Statham, Tony Danza, Halle Barry, Gary Coleman, Gary Oldman, Daniel Baldwin, Cheech Marin, Ricky Jervais, Jimmy Walker, and have a cameo by a recording of Academy Award winning former Vice President Al Gore giving a lecture on how safe sex can stop the hole in the ozone layer.

Wow, two Hudson Hawk jokes in a single review. One more and I qualify for a free small coffee at Rick Springfield's Donut Explosion!

Random pointless joking aside, with a little spit and polish I think that BM could've been a really well done and entertaining movie. The first area in need of some scrubbing is the writing. Though I had little problem with the dialog and the story itself is comic booky adventure fun in an Indiana Jones Meets Jackie Chan way all its own, it's the details in which the Devil makes his nest of vipers and itchy pants. One major burr in my buttcrack is that it's never explained how Monky got the contents of the Scroll of the Ultimate tattooed on his body without reading the damn thing in order to do so. NOBODY is supposed to read the scroll, that's the whole reason he's supposed to protect it. Though I hate filling in the cracks for lazy writers, my guess is that Monky showed part of the scroll to his trustworthy tattoo artist and memorized the other half himself so neither could expose themselves to the entire thing... then again, if that was the case, why wouldn't Monky get the tats on his back instead of his torso, where he can easily see the verses himself with a pair of mirrors or a little practice reading backwards!? Damn it, I've gotta stop taking pity on comic book movies and paving in their plot holes for them.

On top of that, this whole "if you don't believe in gravity than it doesn't exist" central ideal behind the crazy kung-fu stuff is too absurd to just accept. This isn't The Matrix after all! It'd be easier to excuse it as a universal energy field or a bunch of magic bacteria in your bloodstream instead of just saying that belief in reality is the only thing keeping you from walking on air. I guess Jesus must've been a Bulletproof Monk too. When movies start asking me to accept as much blind faith as this, they're getting cornier than religion! If the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Superman shit had been kept to just the people who had contact with the scroll's powers, I would've been fine with it. Instead, everybody who knows how to throw a kick somehow gets the wire-fu "float the air" magic powers and the more I see it the more I grate my teeth. And despite the PG-13 rating, did the movie really need to be dumbed down so much? "Scroll of the Ultimate"!? Come on! How grade school can you get!? Even Kung-Fu Panda's parchment of power didn't have a name that sounds like it came out of an '80s NES game! Or if it did, at least it would've been a good NES game, like Ninja Gaiden or Final Fantasy.

The movie's other biggest trip up in quality comes from its technical side. The green screen work is passable in some parts but especially weak in others, most notably with the opening sparring match between Monky and his sensei on a rickety bridge that gave me bad SegaCD flashbacks. I understand shooting the real thing in this situation would've been disgustingly expensive and impossibly dangerous, but it's not like the whole thing sucked, just every single close-up of the actors killed the illusion. And once the illusion's been killed, it doesn't get to zombie out and try to fool us all over again, it just stays dead and immediately starts to stink. The movie's finale takes a shot in the spleen too from bad green screen work that could've easily been dusted off by just making the friggin' background a little darker! As is, the background's more brightly lit than the actors being displayed in front of it, making me think the computer guys were a little sloppy with their contrast button. Some simple editing and creative shooting could've fixed up all of these problems easy, but like other parts of the movie it feels like these mofos were either just being really lazy or in a mad rush to get everything done on time and under budget with little care for their final product.

Beyond my gripes, I definitely liked the cast. I think Chow Yun Fat and Seann William Scott make for an awesome buddy hero team and I'd gladly watch their back-and-forth act if the two ever found their names on opposite sides of the same billing again. Despite his unsavory past, this movie did manage to pull off the amazing feat of learning me some respect for Scott. The guy actually put the effort into training for his fight choreography and he looks pretty smooth while doing it! If nothing else, at least he's probably a championship level baton twirler by now. As much as I hated the American Pie movies and Stiffler especially, Scott's got this goofy charm behind his big crooked lizard grin that breaks down your tolerance to it with enough exposure. That extra 'n' on the end of his name still annoys the shit out of me though... Jaime King's not a bad actress neither and her turn as Jade made my pants shrink. Something undeniably hot about a Russian mafia princess who likes to show off her midriff, is flexible like a gymnast, and will kick your ass if you try to go all trailer park on her. Roden's pretty good as a psychotic slimeball Nazi, but he's a little too scenery hungry when my Cthulhumas wish would've seen him be a little more cold, calculated, and sadistic in that evil efficient German way, much like the face he'd later show us as Rasputin opposite Rob Perlman's Hellboy.

On a last note, BM (along with those damn Garnier Fructis commercials...) also has a place in my pantheon of "movies more important to me than the whole of their parts" for introducing me to the music of The Transplants, whose stuff litters the flick in PG-13 form throughout. All editing aside though, when I could put a name to the music and picked up their self-titled CD it was one of those "Finally! I've found my holy grail!" searches that makes you feel you've managed to accomplish something with your life, no matter how insignificant it may have been. Fortunately the CD turned out pretty damn good too, so it wasn't one of those damn "searching in vain" deals, like trying to find pumpkin-cheesecake in June or sugar-free Twizzlers.