Thank God for late April. Tax refunds, nice warm weather, and all of the movies that weren’t quite good enough to come out in May show up in theatres. They’re not fine art and they’re not summer blockbusters, but at least they’re not House of 1000 Corpses. Yeah, tax day seems to be the crossover point between the god-awful movies of winter and early spring and the decent cinema of summer.

Case in point is Bulletproof Monk. It’s not an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride, it’s not laugh out loud funny, but it sure as hell ain’t bad.

Based on an underground comic book, Bulletproof Monk is about a Tibetan monk without a name (Chow Yun-Fat) entrusted with the protection of a sacred scroll which allows whomever should read it to bring hell or heaven on earth (really, these monks should think it over a little before making these things) while giving the scroll’s protector the power to dodge bullets and not age. So of course, everyone’s after it. Although in this case everyone happens to be a crazed Nazi or someone from the Human Rights Organization (and we thought the US and Pakistan were strange bedfellows).

The bad news is that sooner or later, our nameless monk has to give it up to a younger, hipper, monk. Except in this case it’s not a monk. It’s a pickpocket who used to go to school with the guys from American Pie (Seann William Scott). Throw in a Russian Mafia Princess (Jaime (nee James) King) as a love interest and we’ve got a kung fu movie with enough enjoyable cheese to bury Switzerland.

For all its kitsch Bulletproof Monk is simple, silly fun. Special effects are sparsely used, and the paper-thin tendrils of Monk’s plot are just enough to hold together the movie for a couple of hours. And while these might not be the most fun two hours of your cinematic year, they’re some of the more enjoyable two hours in this year so far.



Dodging traffic, not bullets.