Think of it as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Intelligence."

Actually, the only real connection between the artful Crouching Tiger and the mercilessly souped-up Bulletproof Monk is the presence of Chow Yun-Fat.

Chow, star of Crouching Tiger and a veteran of the Hong Kong action scene, plays a Tibetan monk protecting a mysterious scroll that could lead to world domination if it falls into the wrong hands.

The movie's major gimmick involves casting. Chow teams with American Pie stalwart Seann William Scott, as a young man who earns extra income picking pockets in subways.

Scott's Kar already has some martial arts skills; he learned them by imitating the Hong Kong stars he watches at the dilapidated theater where he works.

You know a movie has fallen on hard imaginative times when the best it can do for a villain is an unrepentant Nazi (Karel Roden) with an exceptionally bad haircut. Roden's Struker wants what all Nazis want: to rule the world and destroy those he regards as inferior.

For that, he needs the scroll.

After a prologue set in Tibet in 1943, the movie leaps ahead 60 years. Suddenly, we're in the United States, where Chow's character is on the run. He's still attempting to evade Struker, whose hunger for the scroll hasn't diminished.

The monk has a big advantage. As protector of the scroll, he doesn't age, at least not until he passes the mantle to the next protector.

Along the way, Scott's Kar, a man with no family, meets Chow's Monk With No Name. Not weird enough? Toss in the daughter of an imprisoned Russian Mafia don (Jamie King). She winds up becoming a partner in the fight against evil, which culminates in a reasonably exciting rooftop battle.

This comic-book-inspired junk heap of a movie opts for a barrage of crazy-quilt effects. The movie mixes dull dialogue, martial arts wire work and half-baked approximations of Eastern philosophy, some shallow enough to make the average fortune cookie seem profound.

Worse yet, its major characters aren't mythic or funny enough to merit more than passing attention.

The movie earns good karma by keeping gunplay to a minimum, but that doesn't mean there are no casualties. In Bulletproof Monk, East meets West, and everything resembling logic dies in the collision.