This is the second movie starring the thrilling new Thai martial artist JeeJa Yanin (that’s how some places spell it, but as you can see the DVD spells it “JiJa.” I guess she’s still in her Michelle Khan/Michelle Yeoh confusion stage). In CHOCOLATE she played autistic – “a special needs girl with a special need for kicking ass” – here she gets to be more cool and charming. But she also cries alot. There’s alot of the trademark Thai jarring-shift-to-melodrama, but to me some of it was actually pretty effective, like when she looks up at the sky and talks to her dad. (Don’t worry, the clouds don’t form into his face like in THE LION KING. Unless his face just looked like a cloud.)

The new fighting style they introduce is fun to watch. It also incorporates an occasional breakdancing move, with no explanation as far as I noticed. Obviously she looks up to Tony Jaa, but some scenes reminded me of things Jackie Chan would’ve done in the old days. Of course there’s the DRUNKEN MASTER parallels, but the main one for me was a really clever scene before they teach her how to fight. The guys stand behind her and kick the back of her legs so she’ll kick the bad guys, or pick her up and swing her around so she hits people. Basically puppeteering her. Probly my favorite scene.

The story has alot more going on than CHOCOLATE, and it’s alot weirder. There are scenes of “sniffers” going around inhaling digital odor vapors – take that, THE MATRIX. There’s a female bodybuilder villain. There’s a scene where JiJa’s stuck hanging upside down, wrapped in saran wrap. And that thing with the pogo stick legs is never explained or mentioned again after it happens. Maybe that’s just something that happens in Thailand.

Like DRUNKEN MASTER this movie makes light of the act of heavy drinking, and never deals with realistic consequences for a skinny young girl getting hammered every day, unless you count almost getting kidnapped as a metaphor for date rape, and losing in fights symbolic of liver damage and blood alcohol poisoning. But they do have a pretty cool mythic touch – in order to master this style you have to be miserable. You drink because of your problems and channel your troubles into your fighting. She’s had a tragic life and she can use that to fight the good fight or she can let bad people take advantage of it by stealing her tears. She even has a love she knows is pure because it’s destined to be unfulfilled. She loves this guy whose mission is to rescue the love of his life. His love for this other girl makes her love him even more. Throw some Danny Elfman on there and sell this at Hot Topic. (That’s a new catchphrase I’m trying to popularize so I can put it on bootleg t-shirts. “I See Dead People” hasn’t been moving for a long time.)

Although in alot of ways this is more enjoyable than CHOCOLATE it’s not as good in the most important category: the fights. I mean they’re all good, way above average, there’s plenty to like here. But CHOCOLATE was kind of a breakthrough for modern martial arts movies, so I think it’s fair to hope for this one to match or top what was done in that one fight-wise. Most people didn’t like TOM YUNG GOONG/THE PROTECTOR as much as ONG BAK, but you had to admire that crazy tracking shot fight up the stairs, that was a definite case of dumping barrels full of elbow grease and going for the gold. RAGING PHOENIX builds to a pretty cool fight on top of a web of rope bridges. It’s cool, but it doesn’t approach the incredible fight on the side of the building from CHOCOLATE (sometimes called the Donkey Kong fight). So although I got a kick out of this movie (get it, because there is kicking in it, that’s not what I meant but I’ll take it) I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. Gotta get out my copy of CHOCOLATE and watch that last fight again.

When all was said and done I hope  she didn’t give up playing the drums. She seemed like she might be pretty good. Also it would leave room for RAGING PHOENIX VS. DRUMLINE.

Like

Unlike

Nobody knows how long he’ll be a monk or if he’ll ever come back. If you remember, he had a breakdown while directing ONG BAK 2 and ran off into the jungle for two months. Twitch speculates this might be part of him getting out of the shitty deal he was stuck in after that fiasco. But I imagine this is probly better for his mental health than the Thai film industry. I bet it’s good for him.

Whatever happens, this only adds to the legend of Tony Jaa. What more could be done with his onscreen persona is debatable, but he clearly was the biggest martial arts sensation of our age and created some of the best fight scenes and stunts put on film to date. I think this is more likely the Elvis-joining-the-army of his career than the end of it. But if it’s the end it’s pretty incredible for him to willingly leave it at 5 starring roles, about the same number as Bruce Lee.

To me the sad part of the article is what it says about ONG BAK 3 being shitty. I hadn’t heard about that. (or the rumor that he sacrificed chickens on the set of part 2. Well, I don’t condone animal sacrifice but if it keeps him from coming to Hollywood and making THE TUXEDO 2 I’m not gonna complain.)

By the way, I hope somebody took the elephant home and is gonna feed it. It would suck if he left it tied up outside the temple the whole time he’s there.

. . .

thanks to Jennifer K. and Jamie H. for tipping me off to this one.

Like

Unlike

I think we all agree that Tony Jaa is the closest thing we got to a New Jackie Chan. Not that his persona or humor is the same or anything. But he’s an inhumanly great martial artist and stuntman whose movies make our jaws drop with feats of physical prowess and death defiance. They don’t make too many of those these days so it’s a big deal. I don’t know about you but I really hadn’t  quite had a “holy shit, a guy really did that!?” reaction like that since the heyday of Jackie.

I’m sure Jaa has had chances to come to Hollywood and skip forward to the current TUXEDO era of Jackie’s career, and fortunately he’s resisted so far.  Now we know he’s following his own path, because Jackie’s never directed an APOCALYPSE NOW style out-of-control epic. In his directorial debut Jaa went over budget, over schedule, disappeared into the jungle, showed up on some TV show crying, even scared the Weinsteins into un-investing (man, more people should try that trick). Eventually his mentor and director of BORN TO FIGHT Panna Rittikrai took over directing to hep him finish it up in a professional, non-fleeing-into-jungle type manner. The result is a sometimes crazy, always impressive traditional martial arts fantasy, sort of like APOCALYPTO meets CONAN THE BARBARIAN as produced by the Shaw Brothers. There’s one catch though: they figured an easy way to finish it up would be to, uh, not finish it up. It has a “cliffhanger ending” that’s really more of an abrupt stop. A narrator makes some questionable claims about the character’s “past deeds” putting him in this predicament and then asks us to save him like we did for Tinkerbell that one time when she was gonna die and the only cure was clapping. (that was before antibiotics I believe.)

But it’s a great movie until it ends.

If you haven’t heard, this isn’t really a sequel. It’s arguably a prequel. There are some parts where he looks at a statue which I assume is the same one from part 1, although I haven’t seen that movie in a long time. I remember it had the naive country boy in the big city, cheesy action movie criminals, underground fighting, the comic relief of Dirty Balls, lots of bone-breaking fights, impressive jumping, vehicle stunts. ONG BAK 2 takes place in 1421 so it has almost none of those things. But it does have a cameo by the guy who played Dirty Balls (he even makes a comment about “itchy balls”) and it does have fighting. Yes, I can definitely guarantee that it has fighting, I feel very confident in that statement. It has fighting on top of fighting beneath fighting wrapped in a thin layer of fighting, with fighting powder sprinkled around the edge of the plate.

The story is about a kid named Tien who wants to be a warrior but his dad makes him take dancing lessons instead. (Don’t worry kid, it’s like a football player taking ballet. It’ll help.) When their kingdom is under siege they get chased down on horseback, the dad gets sliced and shot full of arrows, but the kid sneaks away. He ends up captured by slave traders who find they are unsatisfied with the quality of his slavery and toss him in an alligator pit. Turns out the alligator pit was the right place at the right time for this guy because the leader of a notorious band of pirates sees the fight and is so impressed he helps him escape and takes him under his wing. You know, like “Hey man, I saw your alligator fight. I’m interested in representing you. Here’s my card.” One of those great “how he got discovered” stories you might see on a Coca-Cola trivia slide before a movie or on the IMDb.

These pirates are cool because they all have different costumes and specialties. They got a guy who looks like Lone Wolf and Cub, a guy who balances swords on his chin, a guy who shoots fire out of his hands, etc. I wish they went into their characters more, because this is a colorful ensemble here that they could do alot more with. But they teach him their techniques from all different schools. He learns different weapons, fighting styles, how to use explosives, magic tricks. And he grows up into Tony Jaa (SPOILER).

When Jaa comes into the movie it becomes all about testing. He has to fight different masters and prove his dexterity by running across a herd of elephants.He’s so badass he makes the elephants bow to him. And I guess the pirates must consider that a good endorsement because they appoint him their new leader.

Once he’s a super-warrior and pirate leader he figures he might as well take advantage of his new resources so he goes back to avenge the wrongs done to him earlier in the movie, tracking down the slavers and the assassins. Earlier it seemed like kind of a weird, free-flowing plot, but now all the pieces come together and the structure reveals itself, it was all setup for what he had to do and how he would do it.

The crazy stunts are what I love most about the Thai action movies, and if that’s you too then be warned that this has less emphasis on those. I guess you can’t exactly bounce off a moving truck in 1421. The most unique and impressive stunts involve the elphants – jumping or spinning off their tusks. There’s even a fight on top of an elephant. I don’t know if any of this is faked, but it looked real to me. You couldn’t do those scenes in the U.S., the Humane Society wouldn’t let you. In fact, the elephants wouldn’t let you, unless you were Tony Jaa. Tony Jaa has a huge following in the elephant community.

So I’m not sure this will be as impressive to the average joe on the street as part 1, but for people who like to watch martial arts on screen it’s an instant classic. The time and crazed dedication Jaa put into it really shows. He doesn’t just fight in his usual muay thai but also in different Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian forms. And best of all he uses a bunch of different exotic weapons, including the 3-section staff like Gordon Liu used in THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN. Now there’s a hell of a weapon! Nunchakas get alot of hype, and righfully so. But a guy who can use a 3-section staff is a guy worth putting in movies. Look I like Jason Statham, but let’s see him figure out what the hell to do with a big stick chained to two other big sticks. The guy would be lost. You’re not gonna see Statham with the 3-section staff, is my guess. Haven’t seen CRANK 2 yet though, I could be wrong.

I really like the other two Jaa movies and I actually thought the stories and filmatism were better than I had heard. But this is a big improvement. Before I thought Jaa’s girly looks and voice were holding him back a little, that maybe he came across a little bit too goodie two-shoes and country bumpkin to be a great action hero. Here he plays a character more in tune with the guy who smashes people’s faces with his knee caps. He looks crazed, sometimes possessed, almost evil. And the movie is courageously low on dialogue.

It’s also by far the best story of these movies. A good legend, not just an excuse to string fights together. A real well told story if you don’t count the part where it suddenly crashes into a wall at the end.

Get back to me after part 3, I guess. For now I love this one with only reservations about the ending.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike

Harrowing, huh? But you know come to think of it I should’ve mentioned that this is from the director of ONG BAK, so the way she collects money is by picking fights with gangsters, battling 15 or 25 guys at a time, doing flips, hopping over and under various furniture and pipes, hitting people with her feet, hands, knees, elbows or head, swordfighting, throwing people off buildings, etc. See, her mom used to be a gangster and all these assholes owe her money, and Zen wants to collect. And it just so happens that one of the things she is fascinated with is the movie ONG BAK. She has focused much of her mental energy on observing muay thai in that movie and in the kickboxing school she lives next to, and has somewhat superhuman hearing and reflexes. It’s just a lucky combination I guess. So look out.

Speaking of lucky, it’s lucky that these are genuinely bad people and not just friends who borrowed money and forgot to pay it back, because I don’t think Zen understands that they’re bad people. She has no concept of good or evil. She’s just trying to collect the money and they’re not handing it over like she thinks they should, so violence ensues like in the movies she sees. I guess CHOCOLATE argues that violence in the media does influence people, and can help treat cancer.

I looked it up – Vismistananda is about 24 years old. But she looks 13 or 14, which makes all her moves and stunts even more surprising. I thought they had a real child actor and I kept looking for a stunt double. The story follows in the tradition of BORN TO FIGHT by being a surprising bummer in contrast to the main attraction, which is of course the long, meticulously choreographed, American-action-movie-embarrassing classic fight scene showstoppers. A 20 minute stretch of one great action sequence after another is immediately followed by a long scene of the poor autistic girl holding her dead mother and crying “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over again, like she doesn’t understand that she’s not gonna wake up. You go from a crack-level action movie high straight into a brick wall. But the buzz was so good you gotta forgive it. It’s a Thai thing, we wouldn’t understand.

Another thing that might be lost in the translation is the title – I know she eats some candy but I’m not sure why the title would be CHOCOLATE. But then I don’t understand what TOM YUNG-GOONG has to do with soup either. Maybe Thai action movies have flavors.

I’m so thankful, because while Jackie Chan is stuck making shitty Hollywood movies that seem to waste the talents he still has at his age, these guys are bringing back that feeling we used to get watching Jackie’s better movies, that feeling that we can’t believe we just saw that, that a human body actually did that. There are plenty of Jackie-esque moves: in one of the earlier fights a guy runs up behind her and she happens to bend over to pick up her dolly, ducking her attacker’s kick, then casually kicking behind her and taking him out. And there’s lots of fighting with props, including a whole bunch of great moves involving a chair. I have noticed that any movie where a martial artist kicks a chair and it stays upright but skids across the floor tends to be a pretty good one. So keep that in mind, filmatists.

Like many martial arts movies you most likely won’t care about the plot as much as the filmatists seem to. (The movie even opens with a dedication to special needs children.) But there is an extremely favorable action-to-non-action ratio and I was impressed by the way each fight seems to one-up the last. What starts out seeming like just a pretty good movie only gets better and better as it goes along. The last half hour or so is pretty much one fight scene after another, going through hand-to-hand, guns and swords. When Zen faces another disabled martial artist (a dude in an Adidas track suit whose twitches are incorporated into his fighting style) it seems like a pretty natural climax. But that scene is long forgotten by the time Zen leaps out onto the side of a building to chase the villain and whack-a-mole his men as they pop out of the windows trying to kill her.

I saw somebody refer to this as “the Donkey Kong fight,” which makes sense because they hop around between different levels of ledges on the side of this building. She kicks heads through windows, dangles from wobbly signs, lassos people around the neck with wires, uses people as a human bridge. The thing I can’t get enough of is that human pinball the thing, where the thugs get knocked down, bouncing off multiple ledges and garbage dumpsters, hitting the street hard, and all in one shot. Admittedly they already did this from moving trucks in BORN TO FIGHT. This one is obviously on a specially designed set and some of the shots might include wire removal and stuff. But still, seeing a stuntman fall off a building and ricochet off of 4 or 5 different hard surfaces on the way down is pretty incredible. It’s a long sequence, and I watched it 3 times. It’s an instant classic. You don’t get an instant classic everyday.

There’s an old cliche that story, characters and filmatic competence are not required in an action movie, that you just want to see shit blow up and guys shooting and punching and maybe some boobs. Of course anybody who would say that is not very observant. If that was the case all the Andy Sidaris and Golan and Globus movies would be equal to or better than DIE HARD. To me the very best are the ones with the full package, where I really do care about the story and characters and there also happens to be breathtaking action sequences.

For some people CHOCOLATE might pull that off. It does have this sentimental idea and a hell of an underdog character with a simple, righteous mission. For me though the whole concept was pretty laughable and clearly wasn’t meant to be, so I wouldn’t go that far. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s in that other category of unforgettable action movies that may be weak in some departments but go so far beyond the call of duty in the planning and execution of the action sequences that they deserve some kind of medal and maybe a scholarship named after them. They become undeniable. Whether the story works on you or not, you would have to be dead not to be impressed by the inventive and dangerous work of the choreographers and stunt people here. That type of excellence doesn’t happen in most action movies, but it pops up sometimes in various periods of Hong Kong cinema, the parkour movies from France and now this wave of Thai movies. The fight on the building belongs in the pantheon of great movie fights. Especially in a time when sloppy and indecipherable action sequences are fashionable it’s exciting to see action with this much of a visceral thrill, that forces you to say “holy shit!” over and over again, even if you’re not the type of person to talk to yourself.

Also I think this movie will be a great inspiration for autistic martial artists around the world much like THE CRIPPLED MASTERS was for amputees in the ’70s or ONG BAK was for the girl in this movie.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike

Well this time when I said that one of my buddies brought up this movie from Thailand, BORN TO FIGHT, as a movie that lives up to that particular responsibility. The movie has a bunch of athlete characters so when drug lords take an entire village hostage and plan to fire a nuclear missile into Bangkok the athletes rise up and use techniques from each of their sports as combat.

He wasn’t lying. There’s gymkata in this movie. There’s a little bit of pole vaulting. There’s a guy who kicks soccer balls at gunmen and when he runs out of balls he jumps up and kicks fruit off of a tree. In short this is a great action movie.

Now, believe it or not it’s not as goofy as that sounds. The tone of the movie is very melodramatic, more THE KILLER than SHAOLIN SOCCER. To give you an idea, the last scene is about a woman having trouble saying goodbye to a little girl who was orphaned during the events of the movie. Many innocent women and children are terrorized in this thing. There is alot of crying. And the story hinges on stirring your patriotic Thai heart. There’s a real Flight 93 moment when the athletes and villagers decide that the right thing to do is to fight back against the guerillas that have them hostage. And it’s not only the asskicking athletes who fight, there are old women and little kids kicking the shit out of these guys. Doing whatever they can. And one guy runs around waving a Thai flag to keep everybody’s spirits up. He never seems to put it down. That would be pretty funny in an American movie too, I would like to see somebody do that.

As you could probaly guess this movie comes from the same scene that produced Tony Jaa. Jaa’s not in this one but it’s a bunch of the same people and produced by his mentor, who starred in the original 1986 version this is supposedly a remake of. I tried to watch that one – the plot has nothing to do with this one as far as I could tell and from what I could bear to sit through there were no stunts other than some old school martial arts. Obviously an important movie in the history of Thai action, since it apparently inspired Tony Jaa to want to do movies. But it doesn’t really translate to 2008 American viewing.

The 2004 version sure does, though. What makes it special is that the stunts in it are god damn spectacular. You can’t really overstate how good they are. The opening shootout with drug dealers involves a fight on top of semi trucks and there are actually some shots of dudes jumping from trailer to trailer and kicking each other – the same thing they did in THE MATRIX RELOADED, except there’s no green screens involved in this one. And then, over and over, you see these guys get knocked off of the trucks, bounce off of other trucks, and (most impressively) land on the ground in the same shot. You see them hit the dirt! There’s a puff of sand that indicates they made the ground a little soft for them but still. Holy shit.

You can’t help but wonder “how the fuck did they DO that?” and sure enough the end credits show outtakes where the guy does the stunt and then they run over to him and… it looks like he can’t move. Oh. That’s how they do it. They throw people off trucks.

(But later there’s another one where a guy gets up and laughs afterwards.)

There’s also some good martial arts scenes. One fight takes place near a camp fire, and a guy falls in and catches on fire. In the same shot another guy reaches in and pulls out a burning log and they start fighting with these logs, shooting flakes of burning wood every time they hit each other. This is not allowed at most campgrounds in the U.S.

The stuntmen in this movie are like human pinballs. If they fall off a truck they’re gonna bounce off another truck. If they get in a fight they’re gonna get kicked off the platform they’re standing on and they’re gonna bounce off some pole or wall or something before they hit the ground. There’s also a whole hell of alot of exploding in this movie. Trucks driving through exploding buildings, guys inside the explosions rolling away from the trucks, all sorts of crazy shit. Don’t tell me somebody “blows shit up real good” until you’ve seen this movie for comparison.

There’s also one really impressive pre-CHILDREN OF MEN continuous shot of a guy running around corners shooting people and avoiding explosions, a hell of a sequence of carefully choreographed violence. It kind of looks like you’re watching somebody play a crazy video game, except it doesn’t look digital at all. It looks real.

And that’s the magic of this movie – doing shit for real. In Thailand the film industry is small. In order to compete with Hollywood’s giant budgets and skilled professionals they have to become the very best at their own regional art, which happens to be falling off trucks and hitting other trucks. Ironically, the more success movies like this and Tony Jaa’s have, the closer we come to the day when Thailand has more money to make movies and doesn’t have to do this crazy shit anymore to make their movies stand out. So let’s enjoy this while we can.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike

Well, I can’t say I didn’t know what I was stepping into. The import DVD of the newest Tony Jaa movie (from the same director as ONG-BAK) has been circling around forever and a day now but I never got around to seeing it. Now those gangsters Bob and Noodles Weinstein have unleashed their bastardized and cut-up version across the screens of America. I knew it was probaly gonna be dubbed, I knew it was shortened (that’s what the Weinsteins do: buy other people’s movies, then cut parts out of them), and I knew it was re-scored.

And it was actually that last part that reeled me in like a sucker fish. Because in the newspaper ads it says in giant letters, almost as big as the title: “MUSIC BY RZA.”

I knew it was wrong to take somebody’s movie and re-score it just to sell tickets to marks like me, but still. Muay thai and RZA beats, right? Sounds like a good Friday afternoon at the Cinerama.

And okay, it was. The movie is definitely worth seeing if you’re a fan of martial arts. It’s very similar to ONG-BAK. Once again Tony Jaa is a naive, rural traditionalist. But instead of the head of a Buddha statue being stolen from his village, it’s two elephants (one adult, one baby) that his family are sworn to protect. This isn’t some gimmick like that movie with Bill Murray. Elephants are very important in Thai culture and history, Jaa comes from a long line of elephant trainers, and he actually owns two elephants in real life. One of his big breaks as a stuntman was as a double for Sammo Hung in a commercial where he had to roll off an elephant’s tusks onto its back, and it’s cool to see him do a few of those types of tricks here.

Language-wise it’s a real mish-mash. Alot of it is in the original Thai, some of it was already in English (since it takes place largely in Sydney, the Vancouver of Asia), then for some reason some parts are dubbed into English. I’m not sure what the thinking is – there is more than enough subtitles to scare away the illiterate neanderthals who they assume all Americans are, so what’s the point of fucking up parts of the movie by dubbing it? Who are you trying to please there?

There was probaly an explanation for how he goes from his father being killed and his elephants getting swiped to facing down the criminals responsible, but if so we’re gonna have to go steal those scenes back from the Weinsteins. ONG-BAK had a generic but nicely executed story to string the fight scenes together, but this one (in its current form) has most of the string cut out so it gets confusing. People will say “Who cares, I just want to see the fights! FIGHT! And PUNCHING!” which is understandable. But the context for these scenes, I’m sure, was already there. It takes more work to cut them out than to not cut them out and now it makes it seem like Thais are a bunch of crazy retards who make movies where suddenly for no reason the main character is in a flooded, burning temple fighting a capoeria guy and a 7 foot bald muscleman. And yes, this scene is awesome but am I crazy to ask for some basic explanation of how the fuck Tony got into this situation? It would be one thing if they made the movie like this in the first place, but to take somebody’s pre-existing, internationally popular movie and turn it into nonsense is kind of cruel.

There aren’t (at least in this version) as many great stunt-related scenes as ONG-BAK. There’s a good high speed boat chase. He runs up a fence or two. There’s not anything comparable to what I thought was the best part of ONG-BAK, the chase through the market where he jumps over and through an series of pointy obstacles (knives, barb wire, etc.) But the fights this time are arguably even better. They don’t seem quite as blunt and hardhitting, but they’re beautifully choreographed and thrilling. Jaa knows the power of posing – the forms his body goes into between the hits is almost more important than the hits themselves. (The same principle as funk music, where the emphasis is on the 1 note. Ask Bootsy about it.)

There are at least three classic fights. Two of them involve Nathan Jones, a scary bald muscleman just shy of 7 feet tall, so he’s more than a foot taller than Jaa. This guy just grabs Jaa by the head and throws him across the room, it’s like some kind of super X-MEN or BLADE battle but you can tell these are both real guys. I guess I saw Nathan Jones in the Jackie Chan movie FIRST STRIKE, but here he has a little more personality than your typical Jackie Chan villain, just because when Tony punches his head ridiculously hard Jones laughs and says “YEAH!” I’d love to see this guy in some more movies – luckily he’s in an upcoming MOST DANGEROUS GAME rip-off from prestigious WWE Films.

The most Jackie Chan-esque fight is the one where he fights a bunch of dudes on rollerblades and bikes, as well as a ROAD WARRIOR type on a 4-wheeler. There’s all kinds of leaping into vans and through windows and up walls and shit. And you know he’s not using wires or stunt doubles, although I’m not sure it’s all real. For example did he really run up that glass window that, in the same shot, the 4-wheeler crashes through? I don’t know, some of that stuff is probaly fake. Not that I’m gonna whine about, just trying to be honest.

But the most impressive scene, and one that will definitely go down in history, is a continuous one-take steadicam shot that goes on for more than four minutes as Tony Jaa fights his way up four stories to the guy he wants to face. As far as I could tell it was really done in one shot, although I’ve read there’s a little digital enhancement as far as broken windows. Still, he beats up a ridiculous amount of people, throwing them down stairs, over ledges, through windows and doors. Someone who has the DVD will have to go through and tally how many people and pieces of furniture are broken. But if you thought that scene in OLDBOY was impressive, well, look out.

And all I could think is THANK GOD this guy was watching Bruce, Jackie and Jet while he was growing up and doing his thing. Jackie and Jet are getting old and compromised now. I think they still have some magic but it clearly can’t last forever. So it’s good to have a possible heir to the throne. Tony’s persona is a little like Jackie’s, because his voice and face are so boyish it’s hard to imagine him playing something besides a naive, innocent hero. But like Jet he’s more serious and he tries to work elements of his Buddhist beliefs into the storylines.

At least as THE PROTECTOR there’s not as much humor as in ONG-BAK, which is kind of a bummer. The guy who played Dirty Balls is back, this time playing an Australian cop who arrests Jaa and then ends up on his side. I hope he always co-stars with Jaa because they play off each other well, they’re opposites. This guy is short and wide, doughy instead of chiseled, out of shape, and his eyes look tired. He doesn’t really get to be funny in this one but he still has a funny air about him. Way to go, Dirty Balls.

I thought there was a Jackie Chan walk-on too, but then I read it was only a lookalike. Sure looked convincing to me. Also, this must not’ve been on purpose but I swear there’s a Rosie O’Donnell celebrity lookalike who you see eating a scorpion with chopsticks.

The miniscule amount of story that is in here is pretty cool. I love that he’s doing it all for the elephants and he has a stronger emotional reaction to the death of an elephant than even the death of his own father. He keeps asking (in Thai) “Where are my elephants?” which is why I think that should be the title. It’s like NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER or GET AWAY FROM MY SISTER. There’s a great moment where he bursts into a big business press conference, baby elephant at his side, and yells “You killed my father! And you stole my elephants!” You don’t see that every day.

So I don’t regret seeing the movie, and if amazing fight scenes is all you need, you shouldn’t miss it. But I do feel bad about supporting these assholes butchering somebody else’s movies this way. They left Disney and started their own company, it’s the perfect opportunity to start over with a clean slate and leave behind the horrible Miramax history of buying foreign films, leaving them on the shelf for years, bullying anybody who tries to sell imports in the U.S., then if they ever release them half the time they cut out half an hour and sometimes they change the title and the music and dub it.

Oh yeah, and as for the music. I was almost willing to let them massacre this thing if it was gonna mean that next great RZA score I’ve been waiting for since GHOST DOG. But yet again, it’s a god damn lie. I’m calling you out Demon Dave style, RZA. THIS IS MY REALITY, RZA. If RZA is gonna score a movie, MAKE SURE RZA FUCKING SCORES THE MOVIE. Let me give you some examples.

• GHOST DOG is RZA scoring a movie. One of the best scores of all time.
• KILL BILL is not RZA scoring a movie. It’s RZA helping compile a real good soundtrack. Okay, I’ll forgive you because it works great for the movie.
• BLADE TRINITY is not RZA scoring a movie. It’s some other dude with RZA adding a little techno.
• UNLEASHED is not RZA scoring a movie. It’s RZA producing two half-assed songs that appear on the credits.

So you’d think I would’ve given up on these claims one or two disappointments ago, but here I was again believing the “MUSIC BY RZA” advertisement. This time he might’ve really done the score (it’s credited to him and another guy, not the original Thai composers, so I assume they collaborated). But it sounds EXACTLY like anybody else’s score. Lots of keyboard violin sounds and MORTAL KOMBAT percussion. Even some cheesy rock guitars here and there. There’s nothing wrong with the score, it’s fine, but nobody in the world would have listened to this and guessed it was by RZA. And when I say nobody in the world, I am including RZA. I am convinced that even he would’ve listened to it and when they told him he made it he’d say, “What? When did I make that? That doesn’t sound like me.”

Which would be fine if they hired him to score it in the first place and he wanted to waste his talents making a generic score and disappointing legions of fans and making babies cry and disgracing the legacies of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the late Ghost Dog. But there was already a score on this movie when they brought him in. WHY IN FUCK’S NAME are you gonna replace the old score with a RZA score UNLESS IT SOUNDS LIKE A GOD DAMN RZA SCORE? And then you advertise that RZA did the score as if some RZA fan is gonna go to hear this score and is gonna be happy with it. Are you DELIBERATELY trying to piss us off?

Here’s what you do, RZA. Your pal Quentin Tarantino put his name on the movie just by adding a “QUENTIN TARANTINO PRESENTS” logo at the beginning. Otherwise, he didn’t change the movie. That’s all you gotta do, “QUENTIN TARANTINO PRESENTS…” and then “ALSO, RZA PRESENTS THIS AS WELL…” That’s all you need, you don’t have to waste your time replacing the score. Unless you’re gonna give us some Wu-Tang.

I’m gonna pull out the big guns here to make my point. I’m gonna pull out DIE HARD. Do you think DIE HARD would be better if they “tightened” most of the story and just had the parts where he blows up the helicopter and the elevator shaft and hangs the guy on the chain? Would that faster pace give you a hard-on? How about if some of the dialogue was dubbed into, say, Japanese, the entire score was redone and some of the classical music was replaced by Asian pop songs? Would that be better, the same, or not as good? Do you think Japanese audiences would like it better that way? If so, would you think they were morons?

A real world example: SHOGUN ASSASSIN. Okay, I can see how that’s a fun movie if you didn’t know where it came from. But they just edited together the violent parts from two separate LONE WOLF AND CUB movies and dubbed that into English. The real movies are equally violent but also beautiful, mythic stories. The whole series made number 2 on our Badass 100 list, that’s just behind the Man With No Name trilogy as the greatest badass cinema of all time. And yet to this day I meet people who won’t watch the actual movies, they just know the version where they cut different swordfights together.

I believe that releasing a movie like this is an attack on multiple cultures. First of all, it’s an attack on Americans because it’s making the assumption that we are morons who are afraid of subtitles and have such short attention spans that we refuse to watch a storyline unfold in our action movies. When Miramax released Jackie Chan’s underrated WHO AM I? they not only cut out some of the storyline, they actually cut out some of the action scenes! What is this fuckin obsession with movies being short? If it’s so important for you to only release short movies then why not only buy short movies? That way you are saving alot of time, energy and resources, and you’re also not being a big fuckin ignorant asshole. Everybody wins.

And then if you’re not tired from mutilating somebody else’s movie you will have more energy to come up with the new American title, and won’t embarass yourself with this “THE PROTECTOR” bullshit. I mean, how braindead are you fuckin people, you got a movie about a guy protecting an elephant and you can’t come up with a better title than that? A title that, by the way, was already used for a widely hated Jackie Chan American vehicle. But I don’t think they’re using it as an homage to that, I think it’s an homage to the time they renamed Jet Li’s MY FATHER IS A HERO as “THE ENFORCER.”

Which brings me to my next point. I think these releases are also kind of racist, or at least xenophobic, or at the very least disrespectful toward the artform of martial arts cinema. These guys don’t give a shit about the characters and stories, they don’t WANT there to be characters or stories. They just want to sell us an Asian minstrel show. They figure if these silly Asian guys can flip around and kick each other fast enough then American morons will eat the shit up. The more generic the better. If it happens to have a distinctive title and concept FOR GOD’S SAKE be sure to hide that in the marketing. MY FATHER IS A HERO starred a little boy who is not shown or mentioned on the box for their version. TOM-YUM-GOONG is about saving elephants and they don’t even show that on the poster or the ads. God forbid somebody remembers which movie this is six months from now. “THE PROTECTOR? Is that the one with Van Damme and Natasha Henstridge? Or the one with the wrestler saving his wife from Robert Patrick? Or is it a John Grisham?”

At the very end of the movie a narrator, who I assume is supposed to be Sgt. Dirty Balls, describes Jaa’s character as an old fashioned guy who cares about tradition. He says that some people may make fun of Tony for that, but he is basically the greatest guy ever so fuck you (paraphrase). Ironically, the Weinsteins are dubbing that into the movie at the same time that they are cynically slicing pieces out of it to make it more modern and fast-paced and retarded. Because nobody likes that old fashioned “let’s explain what the fuck is supposed to be going on in this movie” bullshit. Oh well. I guess that’s the post-post-ironic world we live in.

So see the movie, but if you have access to the real version (or if you’re willing to wait to see if they consider it worthy of inclusion on the American DVD) I’m betting that’s better. Both as a movie and for the soul of America.

P.S. The Brits apparently call it HONOUR OF THE DRAGON, which is arguably even worse.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike