The first 35 minutes is just like a cheesy kid’s movie about trying to get the money to buy their brother an RC car for his birthday, trying to stop the bullies at the RC track, also getting in a fight with a big drunk Australian guy (not Nathan Jones sized, but big). Then all the sudden two very bad things happen:

1. the little brother’s heart gives out and he’s gonna need a transplant

2. the hospital where the transplant heart is located gets taken over by rebel terrorists taking an ambassador hostage to make a point

So the kids try to sneak in and get the heart, just like the Goonies, the Explorers or the Hardy Boys or somebody would, but those little weiners would all get shot and killed before they got into the building and it would be a pretty short and depressing movie. Possibly the Little Rascals could’ve pulled it off, but I’m not betting on it. These kids use their youth to take the rebels off guard but also they use their muay thai skills to beat the god damn shit out of them. It’s not HOME ALONE type hit-in-the-balls-with-a-flying-object-and-it’s-hilarious type of kid movie violence, it’s actually pretty bloody.

This would probly not be considered a kid’s movie in the U.S. We always complain that our media is violent and there’s a double standard about sex, that people got no problem letting their kids watch the Joker murder a guy with a pencil but would be upset if they brought them to a movie where you see a sideboob. And of course that’s true. But also there’s a line drawn somewhere and I don’t think a movie where little kids have brutal, bloody fights with terrorists would fly over here.

But it is definitely a kid’s movie, you can’t really get around that. And I mean that in a derogatory way. But I did enjoy the novelty of seeing kids do insane Thai style stunts. I’m not saying it’s up to the Tony Jaa standard, but it’s past adult level for most countries. These kids do alot of jumping off walls and people, alot of flying knees and kicks. One kid runs and jumps knees first through a window, breaking through glass and hitting a dude. The same kid has a bird’s-eye-view shot of running up a wall, doing a flip and landing both knees on a guy that’s laying on the ground.

Just because it’s kids I assumed there was some kind of special effect involved, some wires or digital enhancements or something. But both shots I just described are shown from other angles on the making-of featurette, and they were done live on set. It’s funny to see these kids beating up the adults and every time the take ends they give a little respectful bow. I assume the adults also do that to each other, unless it’s just a weird etiquette thing they make the Thai stunt youth do, like saying “May I be excused, please?” before leaving the dinner table.

Just to make things seem a little more even they actually have a little girl on the terrorist team. I know it sounds ridiculous but she’s a girl that was orphaned during war so she joined the rebels. She’s an intense-looking little kid and I think they actually get some successful drama out of you wondering if her quest for revenge or her kid-solidarity will win out. It would be sweet if she became friends with them and it would be fucked up if she killed them so either way you’re gonna get some drama.

So yeah, like all the Thai movies I’ve ever seen this has alot of crying and tragedy and melodrama, even though it’s DIE HARD meets muay thai meets little kids.

It’s kinda weird being an adult watching a movie about kids. I’ve learned over the years to appreciate a family film if it’s well made, but usually that’s gonna be about a talking pig or a cartoon character of some kind. But when it’s a human child and you’re supposed to relate to them it feels kind of ridiculous. You can put your sympathies with somebody totally different from you but when it’s a kid sometimes it feels like shit, I been through that before, I don’t want to go back to it. Or jesus these kids today, I lucked out by not being born in their time, I want to take advantage of this and not have to think about what kind of stupid shit they care about. So for example I would rather help somebody move than watch the documentary about that little boy with the bangs that sings on tv, even though it’s from the director of STEP UP 2-3 and even though Drew McWeeny claimed it was an interesting documentary. I just don’t want to look at that kid or hear his music or remember that it’s something that people care about. The modern world just isn’t my bag. I’m a John-McClane-man in a that-kid-from-Twilight-that’s-in-the-John-Singleton-movie-where-it’s-like-Bourne-Identity-with-teens world.

So I get some of that discomfort watching this, I feel out of place with these kids even though they got a tough life and all that. I kinda feel like I’m watching the Disney Channel at first, and not the part with Disney cartoons. But then it turns into what it turns into, which is a movie where gunmen are trying to murder little kids who are throwing around a box with a human heart in it. And bad things happen to the heart.

I mean if the singer kid was gonna get bloodied up and fight for a box with a human organ in it then maybe I would consider watching it, I’m not sure. But that is not something I expect to happen.

winner: the children of Thailand

But MUAY THAI GIANT (originally SOMTUM) is the first movie where he’s a main character. He plays Barney Emerald, an Australian doofus who wins a trip to Thailand in a contest, but then gets drunk and robbed of his money, clothes and passport, and can’t leave the country. He finds shelter at a monastery and befriends two little girls, which made me think this was gonna be kind of cheesy and that’s why I avoided renting it until now.

Well, it is cheesy but what surprised me is that the weak link isn’t the little girls, it’s the giant. Jones, at least in this particular role, is a shockingly terrible actor. He’s playing it for sweetness and laughs, so he’s always smiling and over-selling his expressions in a way where you have to occasionally ask if the character is supposed to be retarded in some way. I don’t think he is, but I’m honestly not sure. He was in the WWE for a short period of time but I think some of this acting would even seem bad in that context where he’s trying to have his expressions seen by the people in the back row.

The joke is supposed to be that although he looks like such a monster he’s a total sissy. When he happens to see a little girl getting threatened by gangsters he tries to help her, but mainly by cowering over her crying and begging for them to let him go. Unfortunately it’s more sad than funny, especially since it continues throughout the movie. How many times can we watch an action scene where a physical specimen like that, who we want to see get in some fights, stands in the middle covering his head and whimpering? It’s not fun.

But the girls do feed him some spicy papaya salad and learn that it has a weird effect on him. Not only does his face turn red but he flies into an uncontrollable rage and starts smashing everything. This causes him to destroy their mother’s restaurant, so he agrees that even if he straightens out his passport situation he’s gonna stay around to help them raise the money to rebuild it. Eventually they turn him into sort of a line cook/mascot, putting him to work with a giant bell instead of a mortar. But first they bring him to some underground fights where they come up with the idea of feeding him spicy food and using his Incredible Hulk type abilities to destroy the other fighters.

And then they decide that would be wrong and don’t do it.

But the interesting part of the movie is that one of the two sisters (Sasisa Jindamanee) is a local muay thai champion. Her mom doesn’t allow her to fight but she does it anyway. In one scene that I can’t imagine in an American movie she tries to raise money by taking a sleazy underground fight against an adult man. She holds her own but gets bloodied and almost knocked out a couple times, and the actress looks about 14 or 15 years old, so it’s pretty crazy.

She has a couple good street fight scenes too. There’s the one when they first meet Barney, where she keeps jumping off his head or chest, or kicking his hand to make him slap the gangsters who are after her sister. Later she gets attacked by the boxer and his thugs while buying papayas for the restaurant. She can mostly handle them by herself but then gets help from the female papaya vendor, who we already knew was tough because she was chewing a toothpick. The scene is fun because they find about a dozen different ways to use papayas as weapons, ranging from throwing them at heads to actually kicking them up a guy’s butthole. Ouch.

The other sister is a pickpocket, and she gets them into alot of trouble with a dangerous international crime syndicate by swiping a jewel that turns out to be the key to a huge stash of drugs and stolen diamonds. In an American kids movie that would have to be some kind of misunderstanding, but in this movie the girl actually is a thief. Her mom tells her not to be and it gets her in trouble but the movie never really preaches against it.

At the end Barney tears apart a private jet with his bare hands. So at least in that respect it’s a good role for him.

Now that I read about him, Jones has had an interesting life. In the ’80s he was doing armed robberies in Tasmania, got caught and did 7 years. While in the joint he got into lifting heavy things. Next thing you know he gets out, becomes Australia’s powerlifting champion. Gets first place in the World Strength Championship 1995. Got interested in MMA and fought at Pride 1 (submitted by sumo wrestler). Became a bodyguard for some rich guy. Then got into pro wrestling. Made it into WWE, but not long after his first televised match was sent to the farm team in Ohio to improve his skills. Came back, was on some team with pre-UFC Brock Lesnar, got tired of it and decided to quit.

He didn’t really make it to the top of WWE, but he got to be heavyweight champion of WWA once and tag team champion of NWA. In 2003 he won Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s “Most Embarrassing Wrestler” Award. But he has a degree in economics.

Well, this is a pretty stupid movie. I guess I shouldn’t get so excited about a guy just because he’s giant. Turns out that doesn’t make him a movie star. He makes a good big guy for little guys to fight, though. Nothing can take that away from him.

Now comes word that TYG 2 will co-star Jija Yanin, that badass little asskicker who starred in CHOCOLATE and RAGING PHOENIX. (thanks to rewrite in the comments for tipping me off.)

To show you what a small world we live in, note that one of the other stars is Marrese Crump, whose only previous feature film credit is in WRONG SIDE OF TOWN, directed by my old internet acquaintance “Demon Dave” DeFalco. I remember him from that because he had a good fight scene against Dave Batista. I guess he was also the RZA’s stunt double in THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, so that might be how he got this job.

Now, some of you might not give a shit about this next part, but I’m extremely excited to read that TYG 2 will be in 3D. Of course my first thought is “shot in 3D, right? Not fake 3D like CONAN?” Well, this photo from the Cannes Film Festival confirms that, at least according to the promo art, it’s being “shot in 3D” like you would hope. Like you would demand. Like you would request in your column in the June, 2011 issue of CLiNT Magazine.

If you didn’t, don’t worry – I did. In a column titled “Badass Cinema 101 …in 3D. And 2D in select magazines” I wrote about why I thought there was alot of unfulfilled potential for real action movies shot in 3D. I argued that if we found out that one of the classic Bruce Lee fights or Michelle Yeoh’s motorcycle jump from SUPERCOP or something like that had been shot with 3D cameras then we would want to see it immediately, because those are great, historic physical feats worthy of preserving in any way technology allows. I concluded:

So you see, TOM YUM GOONG 2 IN 3D was my idea, in my opinion. And I’m glad I could contribute. Your welcome, future generations.

CLiNT Magazine is available on fine British news stands, I believe

If you’re like me, that’s all you really need to know. I didn’t bother to find out what it was about before I saw it, but you’re already here and we got some time so I might as well tell you. A team of attractive young stunt people (called “Fight Club” in the subtitles, “Fighting Club” in the credits) are in the finals of some kind of reality show competition for stunt people. They’re competing against another team called Stunt For Life and the winner will get to “go to Hollywood.” It must be the dream of every Thai stunt person to go to Hollywood so they don’t have to get knocked off those trucks anymore.

They do (spoiler) win the competition, but there’s a catch. At a celebratory dinner they’re drugged, and they wake up the next day in an abandoned building. They’re looking around, trying to figure out what’s going on when a DEATH RACE type reinforced car drives in and starts running them over (but they’re stunt people, so they can roll over it safely). Soon they learn that that whole Hollywood thing was bullshit, actually some of their friends are kidnapped and they have to fight thugs to rescue them while rich people watch on closed circuit cameras and bet on their fates. So it’s like THE HANGOVER meets THE RUNNING MAN, I guess.

If you win American Idol you get a hit record, one lady got an Oscar. This show you win, you get put in a human cockfight. The whole thing is run by a decadent American, Mr. Sneed, played by some guy named Speedy Arnold. He only speaks English and he refuses to stop smoking his cigar in a hospital because “that would be a Thai law. I’m not Thai.” He hosts a couple of evil rich people from different countries in a lounge set up inside a trailer, with beautiful servants serving them drinks and sitting on their laps.

The bad guy fighters have handkerchiefs on their faces or wear masks, except for a fighting transvestite with his nipples showing through his lingerie. Of course he
has to be unmasked – his wig and cup removed, his balls bashed and headbutted. Also in the middle of everything is a cartoonish gay stereotype wedding musician who’s supposed to be the comedy relief, I’m sure, but could really, really stand to be entirely removed from the movie. Jesus.

At one point a pair of hands tears through a wall behind a good guy, grabs him and pulls him off screen, then tosses him back in. It’s a trademark Jason Voorhees move, so I was really happy when the perpetrator turned out to be a big, lumbering Jason type, complete with a mask (like Jason Statham’s Frankenstein mask in DEATH RACE) and an ax. For a while it becomes a slasher movie with acrobatic martial artists as the prey. The Jason guy even catches fire and continues to walk around slowly, bust through walls, etc. But when he swings his ax at them they know how to fight back.

There’s a ridiculous amount and variety of action. They run around, nimbly leaping on top of, over and through things, rolling, flipping, tripping, bouncing off walls, dangling from heights by one arm, dropping through trap doors and solid floors. The good guys and bad guys leap across opposite ledges and crash mid-air. They fight with fists, spinning and flying kicks, headbutts, various metal poles and knives.

There’s a great fight inside a chain link cage, with the fighters constantly climbing like Spider-man, hanging upside down, flipping and bouncing off the sides. But the most memorable fight is the huge warehouse rumble that might be inspired by the one in HARD BOILED. There are people doing complex, choreographed fights in the foreground while in the background you can see all kinds of other stunts going on. Must’ve been a pain in the ass to shoot. The reinforced car shows up and starts doing donuts, just nailing everybody, like 6 or 7 people rolling over it at a time. Eventually the car gets pinned down and they fight on top of it. It turns very pliable all the sudden and they crush each others’ heads through the windows, the doors, the hood, they leap on top of each other and crush each others’ bodies into the cavity of the crunched vehicle, like they have super strength.

Leading the team of mercenary killers is an older guy I recognized from Tony Jaa movies or something. I thought it was the director at first, but probly not. Anyway he represents the old generation, he claims he could handle all the kids by himself, but his boss is skeptical because he’s old and has asthma. Eventually the old guy does have to take the whole Fighting Club on by himself, and does an impressive job. He stands on top of some of their unconscious bodies as he fights the others (at that age your feet can get sore if you don’t have some sort of padding to stand on), he impales their arms with metal spikes, punches them in their throats. Only after they’ve all been beaten to a pulp, and they’re collectively crawling around pulling on his legs, and wrestling his asthma inhaler away from him, can they finally just barely scrape together a victory.

There’s alot of goofy shit in here. The sort-of main dude is kind of sadsack who wears baggy sweaters and has bangs down over his eyes, but happens to know how to do 720 degree spinning kicks and shit. Also they got a mom who comes to their practices and brings them all sandwiches, and they all call her “Mom.” I will not give away whether or not she gets kidnapped and they have to rescue her. But of course it’s all treated very seriously, except for the wacky gay guy, and the Farrelly brothers style credits where the injured survivors get up out of their hospital beds and dance around.

Alot of people say that the plots in ONG BAK, TOM-YUM-GOONG and CHOCOLATE are shitty and they like the movies despite them, but I think BKO, as fun as it is, makes you appreciate the stories in those other ones. There’s a simplicity to them that really works. They each have one lead character with a big problem, they are on a journey to achieve a specific goal, and as they travel through different areas the action varies and escalates. This one I guess has the one big problem and is even more simplified since it takes place mostly in the one location. But it has something like 10 main characters to keep track of, all in one building but in different parts of it. You don’t really feel like you know or care about them much and you have to remember what’s going on in the different parts of the building. Also it keeps cutting to brief flashbacks, mostly from the dinner party before they passed out, and that’s not necessary.

Meanwhile you have all kinds of stunts and fighting techniques but since it’s almost entirely in the one building it manages to feel more repetitive than it ought to. The other movies have more of a progression to them.

My favorite Thai action movie is actually the 2004 version of BORN TO FIGHT, which is also a big ensemble. But since they were all athletes representing different sports they each had a specialty (such as gymnastics or kicking soccer balls) that set them apart from each other. Also it was mostly outdoors so there was more variety in the action as they were traveling around and things were exploding and shit.

This also doesn’t look as good as those other movies. I believe it’s shot on some kind of digital video that kind of looks like a shitty TV show sometimes, and there are annoying white flashes throughout the movie for reasons I could not discern. Some of this might be the particularly bad DVD screener they sent out, which had multiple watermarks, plus the usual switching to black and white periodically and for some reason a 4:3 transfer. So maybe it’s not fully color corrected and will look better in the real release (maybe the people who saw it at Actionfest can verify that for us).

But those are reasons why BKO is not the best of these types of movies. They’re not enough to hold it back.  It’s still an incredible collection of things you’ve never seen before, and in the final stretch, when the Club get free and come after the bosses, the action does finally change locations in an exciting way. We’re denied the satisfaction of a complete comeuppance (partly because they never get to go after the gamblers) but they do get to enter the trailer lounge and fuck some shit up just as it’s being pulled away on a truck. While one character climbs on the top of the trailer another has a fist and gun fight inside and two others have a martial arts duel while hanging beneath the undercarriage. You gotta respect a movie that does that. For now on, and starting with this one, any movie that has that will get my respect.

Hounsou plays Curtie Church, a mercenary hired to take out some sex traffickers in Bangkok to avenge the death of a guy (who played a similar character in THE MARINE 2)’s daughter. Turns out Church being manipulated to start a war between two gangs, so he gets caught in the middle. A young girl from the brothel follows him to his bell tower hideout. To protect his mission he gags her and ties her to a pole, only to eventually (you better sit down and swallow all liquids first, this will surprise you) soften up and start trying to help her out.

There are alot of cool things about this character. Of course he’s got the ol’ heart of gold, but you gotta dig to get to it more than with some movie heroes. He’s gruff and doesn’t talk much and doesn’t mind manhandling the girl to protect his own ass. And obviously he’s an elite warrior, a one-man-army, that’s why they can feel confident hiring just one of him. He does some bombings, some close range gun battles, some hand-to-hand and a whole lot of sniping.

I think maybe he has some kind of hypnotic powers over people too because I can’t figure out why they never think to look for him in the bell tower where all his bullets keep coming from.

Hounsou is great for this type of role. Physically he’s intimidating and comes off appropriately unfriendly. I’m not sure if he’d have the charisma to play a more funny, lovable type of action hero, but he’s born to play mysterious, scary badasses of this type. I hope he gets some more action vehicles like this instead of just having to play the exotic sidekick or villain. (Maybe Millennium could put him in LIMITS OF CONTROL 2: BURMA RISING). He’s interesting to watch going through the procedures, setting up his attacks, preparing his weapons. The belltower is between the brothel and a Buddhist temple, a constant reminder of his sins, etc. But it’s also handy because when he needs to hammer pieces of a rifle together he syncs up with the monks hitting their bells so nobody will hear him.

Bacon plays Church’s old CIA contact who’s now a sleazy arms dealer. His character is credited as “Jimmy the Brit,” which blows my theory that he was doing an Australian accent. But I’ll chalk that up to my own ignorance and not Bacon’s lack of success. I admire Bacon as an actor who seems willing to give any role his full efforts. This isn’t one of his top roles ever but it’s pretty awesome to see him playing a type of character that’s usually played by a nobody in a Millennium production. And he’s obviously having fun.

Like other Pinkaew movies (and Thai cinema in general) it wears its heart on its sleeve. Not only does it have alot of Buddhist spiritual elements, but it ends with text about what a bad problem sex trafficking is. I wonder if RAMBO (part 4) got the idea from Thai cinema to combine violent action with outrage about real world atrocities? They all seem to combine fun action with long scenes of crying. There’s also an elephant in here, as the title implies. It’s not featured as prominently as in the Tony Jaa movies and I think it’s CGI, and also I don’t really understand what its significance is, but one of the gangsters has a white elephant. If you’re into that.

Come to think of it I’m not sure why it’s ELEPHANT WHITE and not WHITE ELEPHANT. Maybe there should be a comma in there: ELEPHANT, WHITE?

With its interesting leads, Bangkok locations and weird touches, ELEPHANT WHITE is worth watching for DTV action fans. But it’s bad news too if all the makers of amazing Thai action movies are gonna want to branch out into movies like this. It will kill their reputation and their unique qualities like Hollywood did to John Woo and his generation’s. Pinkaew does bring a distinct flavor to it, but what’s the point of him and his incredibly talented stunt crews making movies that don’t try to live up to the standards of the ones they make for Thai audiences? Unless you can get Kevin Bacon to fall off a building, bounce off various ledges and hit the ground in one non-CGI shot then I don’t think this is your true calling, Mr. Pinkaew. Do you want to be HARD BOILED or BROKEN ARROW?

To be fair the action scenes are better than in some movies, but they’re not at all what anybody would want from the director of ONG BAK. Nobody’s gonna use the word “spectacular” for any of these scenes. The best one is just a shootout where his gun is so powerful that it sends everybody he hits flying through the air. That’s a fun scene but it’s not the side-of-the-building fight in CHOCOLATE or the market chase in ONG BAK or the continous-shot stairway battle in TOM YUM GOONG/THE PROTECTOR/GIVE ME BACK MY ELEPHANT. If making English language movies means leaving behind the incredible drive, skills, fearlessness and oneupmanship that led to those scenes then fuck English language. He can speak complete gibberish if he wants. I hope he got a bit of money for this one and now can go back and try to somehow top what he did in CHOCOLATE.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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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]

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