‘Monk’ a fortune cookie overstuffed with trash

In theaters

BULLETPROOF MONK, directed by Paul Hunter, written by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, 103 minutes, rated PG-13.

The new movie, “Bulletproof Monk,” finds poor Chow Yun-Fat, so great in so many Hong Kong action films and so perfect in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” asked to sell this sort of fortune-cookie trash: “Water too pure have no fish.”

Chow, baby, movie this dumb deserve no audience.

The film also stars Seann William Scott, lean as a string bean and scruffy as a billy goat, in the sort of performance that suggests his best work to date isn’t here, but in “Dude, Where’s My Car.”

Dude, say it isn’t so.

Directed by Paul Hunter from a screenplay by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, the film is based on a popular comic book, which will surprise nobody who sees it.

Like a cartoon cell, everything about the movie bleeds off the screen, which isn’t large enough to contain all the unnecessary hoo-ha Hunter and company have felt compelled to cram within it. Indeed, this overstuffed, overwrought, cinematic pinata features a riot of plot threads crisscrossing and weaving so relentlessly, they eventually form a noose from which the movie hangs itself rather spectacularly.

In a nutshell, the plot: Yun-Fat stars as The Monk With No Name – yes, The Monk With No Name – a Tibetan monk who, in 1943, inherits from Master Monk (Roger Yuan) the Scroll of the Ultimate, which not only has the power to keep him from aging, but also offers total world domination.

Naturally, the Nazis get involved – of course they do – and, as you’d expect, they prove incredibly tenacious in achieving their goal of possessing that scroll. The chief Nazi, Struker (Karel Roden), is so determined to have it, he and his Nazi posse follow the unnamed monk through the decades. Sixty years later, looking a bit shopworn, they launch a major showdown between monk and his new pickpocket protege, Kar (William Scott), a young, wisecracking tough who has learned the art of kung fu by emulating countless kung fu movies.

What fresh hell is this, you might ask? For starters, it’s a high-concept Hollywood blockbuster wannabe, a movie that finds monk and Kar pitted not only against the Nazis, but also against the unsavory Mr. Funktastic (Patrick Hagarty) and Bad Girl (Jaime King), who, it turns out, is a Russian mafia princess who might not be so bad after all.

If you’re feeling dizzy, put your head between your legs and breathe. If not, know this – somehow, the movie finds the energy to bulldoze forward in spite of being waterlogged with so much poorly conceived, ridiculous excess.

Ripping off those high-flying moves from “Crouching Tiger” and “The Matrix” doesn’t help, nor do the second-rate special effects, the hilarious claymation makeup that ages the actors and the chemistry between Yun-Fat and William Scott, which has all the snap of a week-old sugar pea.

Remember when it was in vogue for monks to make a vow of silence? Some might long for those days in “Bulletproof Monk.”

Grade: D

On video and DVD

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN, directed by Paul Justman, written by Walter Dallas and Ntozake Shange, 108 minutes, rated PG.

In “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” director Paul Justman is betting most haven’t heard of the Funk Brothers, a group of black and white artists who, between the late ’50s and the early ’70s, cranked out more No. 1 hits than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beach Boys combined.

That’s 58 No. 1 hits. Songs such as “Heat Wave,” “My Girl,” “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “What’s Going On?” to name a few.

The film, from a script by Walter Dallas and Ntozake Shange, reaches back to the early years of the Detroit jazz musicians Berry Gordy snapped up for a song, so to speak, and hired to create music for his new label, Motown. Those musicians – some of whom are alive (Jack Ashford, Uriel Jones, Eddie Willis, Joe Hunter, Robert White, Bob Babbitt and Joe Messina), others of whom have died (Johnny Griffith, Benny Benjamin, Eddie Brown, James Jamerson, Richard Allen, Robert White and Earl Van Dyke) – are finally given their due in a film that dramatizes their early years, interviews the living and gathers together for a final concert all of the surviving members.

Joining them onstage are singers such as Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins, Joan Osborne, Gerald Levert, Ben Harper and Meshell N’degeocello, all of whom spark the film with rousing stage performances of Funk Brothers hits.

While the film’s dramatizations are similar to the cheesy sort found on the History Channel, and the film lacks the completeness of an interview with Gordy himself, which would have given the movie added depth and lifted it to the level of “The Buena Vista Social Club,” “Standing in the Shadows of Motown” is nevertheless entertaining and important, putting these men squarely in the spotlight that has eluded them for years.

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.