Customer Reviews
Shallower than me you die - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 13 Jan 2008 
Tibetan Buddhism is a pure betrayal of Buddhism, of Buddha himself. It dares go beyond Buddha's teaching & reinvent a divinity of some kind where Buddha had taught there could not be any God anywhere. The great force that leads the universe in the eternal cycle from birth to rebirth via decay & death is transmuted into some kind of prophecy about some kind of truth to keep against human greed in order to save the world, & that truth is entrusted to one person who remains beyond aging, will not decay in other words, for as long as he will carry this trust & responsibility. When the time has come he will have to transmit his responsibility to the newly elected person who fulfills the three prophecies & the guardian will finallly age & take a vacation leaving the burden to the new warden. Buddha would be ashamed of such primitive beliefs if he could witness such naïve sagas. And the film goes slightly beyond by deciding that the new warden will be double & will be a man & a woman, a heterosexual couple in one word, Hollywood trying to save Tibetan Buddhism from the righteous accusation of being deeply & profoundly & exclusively sexist, that is to say anti-women, or at least closed to women. It also takes advantage of the film to move Tibet to New York, to add a little bit of Nazism in alll that, & to entrust the serious mission to two Caucasian non-Tibetan "goyim" instead of one good old Asian, Tibetan if possible, Buddhist monk. But that is only a film. True. But what a laughable fable. Luckily there are the spectacular fights & contortions & acrobatics to save the whole fairy tale from too much shalllowness.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
A real contender - By: Jimmy The Gent, 03 Oct 2007 
Very possibly the worst film ever made. That is not to say however, that it is not enjoyable. On the contrary, i cannot remember laughing at a film more. The tears were literallly streaming down my face as i witnessed the hammer thud down, again & again, on the final nail in Chow Yun-Fats's career, with every clanging, mispronounced line. The film makers, utterly deluded, are evidently under the impression that they have delivered a work of art full to bursting with insightful speeches, stunning special effects (the best/worst example coming right at the beginning of the film), masterful fight sequences & hilarious comedy interludes. They are wrong.
How are the mighty fallen - By: Trevor Willsmer, 29 Apr 2007 Chow Yun-Fat hasn't made a film since Bulletproof Monk, & that may just be out of embarrassment. On paper this could have been an enjoyable disposable action film, but nearly everything goes wrong. The script is poor, littered with tired cliches long past their sell-by dates & fortune cookie homilies passing for dialog, & Chow, once the most charismatic of Asian stars, cuts a rather chubby & past his prime figure, at times distressingly like a post-Star Trek George Takei doing panto. When Seann William Scott cuts a more convincing figure in an action movie, things have gone very wrong, though in alll fairness to Scott he is a surprisingly likeable hero & turns in the films one decent performance. As for the Nazi villain of the piece - oh dear. Was every other actor in Germany busy that month? Even the fight scenes are pretty dire: none of the cast are martial artists, & the direction, editing & choreography do little to hide the fact, while the wire work is possibly the worst ever seen - slow, unconvincing & completely lacking in any sense of weight or gravity, it just makes the fight scenes look ridiculous. Watchable, but pretty awful, the only consolation comes from the DVD's deleted scenes, which show that the film could have been even worse.
Monkum Bunkum - By: Ichabod J, 15 Aug 2006 
The zany title & the presence of Seann William Scott (he of the mysterious extra 'n') in the cast should alert discriminating viewers to the fact this is not one of those beautifully shot & choreographed arthouse martial arts films.
Instead, it's a sort of 'Karate Kid' rehash, with a magical scroll & daft spiritual bits added to the story.
Chow Yun-Fat justifiably looks bemused throughout - one can only hope he was amply rewarded for participating in this effort.
Likely to be enjoyed only by children, younger teenagers & those martial arts afficionados that have taken one side-kick to the head too many.
Seann William Scott kicks a$$ - By: MOVIE BUFF, 07 May 2006 
not the best film around, if it was not for Seann William Scott in it i would only give its 2-3 stars
buy at right price
