Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I’ll try to be as direct as possible about this.
If you’re not a fan of old-school martial arts films... the ones before people started flying everywhere and we started nominating them for Oscars... then there is no reason for you to read this review or see this movie. ONG BAK is traditional to a fault. What makes the film noteworthy is the feeling while watching it that you’re seeing the birth of a movie star, someone we’re going to see a lot more of in the years to come. Tony Jaa is the single most exciting new martial artist to appear in film since Jet Li, or even possibly Jackie Chan.
As a film, ONG BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR (the title of the American release version that Magnolia Pictures is set to release) is a nimble piece of entertainment, a familiar story that comes to explosive life whenever Tony Jaa begins to fight. Jaa plays a young man who must leave his village when the head of their sacred Buddha statue is stolen. He journeys to the big city, where he hooks up with an amoral hustler (Perttary Wongkamlao) who came from the same village, but who has turned his back on the values with which he was raised. He gets dropped into the world of underground fighting against his own best wishes, the only way he can find the people responsible for defacing the Buddha statue in the first place.
And... that’s pretty much it. Writer/director Prachya Pinkaew has a sharp sense of humor, and the version I saw was paced really well. How much of that is thanks to the post-production polish by Luc Besson as he prepared the film for international release is impossible for me to say, since I never saw the original cut from Thailand. The film takes a little while to get going, and Tony Jaa’s not the most expressive actor I’ve ever seen. It helps that the guy he hooks up with in the city is very funny and knows how to play off of him. When Jaa finally gets pushed into his first fight, you’re primed and ready, and Jaa does not disappoint. Muay Thai is a particularly bone-crunching style of fighting, all knees and elbows and impact, and the fights in this movie look like they were shot full-contact. Jaa’s just as impressive out of the arena, like during an acrobatic foot chase where he seems to defy gravity and the limitations of his own skeletal structure.
Like any good martial arts film, there’s a rhythm to the way this one builds, and it gets more brutal as it goes. It’s impossible not to react to some of the film’s big stunts, with the final fight being particularly outstanding. The movie’s got no interest in being politically correct, as evidenced by the fact that the bad guy is a dude in a wheelchair who speaks through a cancer kazoo, and there are any number of freaky henchmen for Jaa to work his way through. There are some story points that don’t quite make sense, like when Jaa loses a fight and it’s not clear if he threw it or if he actually lost because his opponent is doped up. If you’re watching a film like ONG BAK and obsessing on narrative details, though, you may be missing the point. The details that matter in this movie are the visual flourishes, the moments of impact. Watch the opening scene, where 40 young men compete to scale a giant tree and grab a flag from the highest branch. No CGI. No wires. Just stuntmen getting fucked up, the way the good Lord intended. There are plenty of oddball touches. Sharp-eyed viewers will pick up a grafitti message to Steven Spielberg right in the middle of a chase. I love how certain shots are repeated for emphasis. One friend advanced the theory that any stunt repeated twice means the stuntman got sent to the hospital, and any stunt repeated three times means the stuntman died. Sounds right to me. This is an adrenaline rush, a kick in the head, a big fat slice of action movie chocolate cake, and Tony Jaa deserves a huge career. We may never see him playing HAMLET, but I’ll bet he kicks ass in a whole series of films, and if anyone ever gets around to to teaching him English, there’s no telling just how big he’ll get.
"Moriarty" out.
