OxfordPress.com

Most every cliché, old and recent, of the mismatched buddy action genre gets a workout in this story of a semi-immortal Tibetan holy man and a sassy young American pickpocket uniting to protect a magical ancient scroll from an underground neo-Nazi organization.

There's banter between Chow's droll Monk With No Name and Seann William Scott's brash, unbelieving, basically good-hearted criminal, Kar. There's a chick (Jaime, nee James, King) who may be an ally or an enemy and can do the martial-arts moves as well as the guys. There are lots of impossible stunts courtesy of invisible Hong Kong wire workers and CGI effects that look like they came out of a computer. There are unlikely revelations that prove completely predictable.

And, of course, the story doesn't hold up to the least bit of logical scrutiny.

MWNN is the latest in a long line of hard-to-kill Tibetans who guard that scroll, which when precisely utilized grants eternal youth or world-dominating power or something. So, naturally, Nazis come after it during World War II, killing everybody in the monastery except MWNN.

Sixty years later, he shows up unchanged in generic North American Metropolis (i.e., this was filmed in Canada). Against his better judgment, MWNN suspects that the undisciplined Kar possesses the prophetic specs required for the next scroll guardian. Meanwhile, that darn boss Nazi (Karel Roden) is still after the scroll, and his beautiful-but-deadly granddaughter Nina (Victoria Smurfit) will go to any lengths to obtain it.

TV commercial whiz Paul Hunter gets a lot of superficial style into his feature directing debut while unfolding the convoluted story as clearly as it deserves to be told. Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris ("Demon Knight") very freely adapted it from the Flypaper Press comic book.

Chow injects the right degree of humanizing humor into his stoic character, but little else. We get no inkling of the conflicts that might arise from spending indefinite celibate decades fighting to protect some silly plot maguffin. Scott gets to expand his acting range a little without sacrificing the bad-boy impudence that is his stock-in-trade, but he's not exactly playing a real person, either.

At best a time-filler, "Bulletproof Monk" is hardly one for the ages.