Yesterday evening, after spending 45m on an Elliptical Trainer, I walked around the corner to the Kirkland Parkplace Theater to watch "Bulletproof Monk".

It was a disappointment.

The characters, especially the villain, were cardboard cartoons, but that was to be expected. The plot was very thin, but that was to be expected, as well.

The only good fight moments, and all the visually cool bullet-time FX shots in the entire movie, you've already seen in the trailers.

All the rest of the fight scenes were clunky, and poorly edited. In fact, it was all badly edited. You know how when editing is done well, or even just competently, the operative term is "seamless", to the point where you don't notice the fast cuts? This was the opposite of that. The fast cuts were badly placed, cut backs made people jump in position, and they didn't even keep the color and intensity of the lighting consistent, so you could actually tell that the scenes were shot in pieces and stitched together. Hell, you could even see effects cuts in the middle of punches and jumps.

And the cinematography! I could never stop remembering that I was looking through a camera. Every time I just about got to the point where I would forget, the director would do something stupid with the cinematography that would just scream "Hey! You're looking through a camera!".

The "surprise twist" at the end was obvious and overly telegraphed. The first of the cyclic "ancient prophecies" depends on a bad pun that works only in English, which means that this isn't going to translate well for the non-English markets.

Don't bother. Don't even bother renting it.