| Overall Grade: |
D- |
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| Story: |
C |
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| Acting: |
C- |
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|
| Direction: |
D |
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|
| Visuals: |
D+ |
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My goodness me, this is bad
by gdfg (movies profile)
Jul 12, 2004
2
of
3 people found this review helpful
Wow. How lame can a film be?
1. So many awful wire-fu moves, even when they are not needed. Characters flip thru the air and spin round just to get out of bed. Suffice to say it looks utterly uncovincing.
2. The action. The fight scenes are straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But with added cartoon-like wire-fu, naturally. From the opening fight 'on a rope bridge' to the final fight with a superstrong Nazi, it's all embarassing.
3. The sets. Again, straight out of Buffy. After seeing the sewers, the street gang's hideout and the bad guy's evil lair, I was convinced they were using sets from Buffy. How much did this movie cost? Looks like no more than $1m.
4. The visuals. People have noted that this movie looks ten years old. You could even go back to the late 80's and it wouldn't look out of place. The cinematography is completely devoid of imagination, and again, TV quality, not film.
5. Chow Yun-Fat knows he's in absolute garbage but still manages to be watchable. Seann Williams Scott just wants to get the movie shot as soon as possible. Jamie King is sexy but has nothing to do, despite the fact that she appears to be have a moral battle going on. Three good, charismatic actors given the right material. Here they are all floundering.
6. All the dramatic stuff is left out. Scott gets irritated by Chow, but just accepts that this weird monk guy is in his house, following him around. Scott embraces his destiny to be a hero wihout so much as a wringing of hands. Jamie King starts off as bad girl, then pretty much immedietly sides with Scott. Moral dilemma? What's that?
7. Unoriginal. Stunningly so. I think this may be the most unoriginal big budget movie ever made. I can't think of one element that hasn't been seen in atleast ten other movies.
Scott actually says at one point, "I'm a thief, not a hero." Bulletproof Monk didn't have a script, it had a blueprint.
8. The editing. Rapid cuts that render entire scenes pointless and confusing. This is the editing you use when you have got footage that is unconvincing and doesn't piece together. I can just imagine the director, "Hey, Stiffler is obviously on wires in this shot, let's just cut from him running forwards to the bad guy flying backwards thru the air.."
So there we go - Bulletproof Monk is an incompetent 1987 TV movie masquerading as a big budget Hollywood martial arts extravaganza. I almost laughed in disbelief after the movie finished. |
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