We saw Bulletproof Monk today, and boy, what a piece of crap that was. Seriously. I'm talking MST3K-level bad.
It would be unfair to describe it as a bad ripoff of The Matrix, because it's a bad ripoff of so many other things as well. There was exactly one exciting scene, where Chow Yun-Fat finally gets his hands on a pair of automatics and starts blasting away in slow motion--just shooting the weapons out of the bad guys' hands of course, because he's a peaceful Buddhist monk--and then ejecting the clips and kung fu kicking them into the bad guys' heads, knocking them cold. Looking cool with guns is what Chow Yun-Fat does. Making him the star of a kung fu movie just doesn't work (exception noted), the way sticking a gun in Jet Li's hand doesn't work. I'd think making Jet Li the star of this one might have saved it except it was just so very bad. Think Wing Commander here.
To its credit it does contain one of the best lines ever in bad movie history*, where a tough Cockney gang leader (in New York?) with the giggle-inducing name "Mister Funktastic" backs out of a fight with Seann William Scott because his girlfriend wants to fool around: "You're just lucky this bit of crumpet came begging for some of my funktastic love!"
This is not to say the movie wasn't fun. It was fun, in a bad movie sorta way. If it happens to come on cable down the road and you have nothing else to do, you might enjoy it and you'll feel better for having saved yourself seven bucks to see a b-movie.
NOTE 4/28/03: It's been brought to my attention that comparing this movie to Wing Commander is unnecessarily harsh. I agree, and respectfully withdraw the comparison. I was overwrought at the time.
* Runner-up was a line later on, where the female lead tells Seann admiringly, "I've never seen anyone stand up to Mister Funktastic before."