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

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]

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]

You see, there’s this small town in Thailand somewhere (possibly called Ong-Bak, unless that is only the name of the buddha statue there, but the subtitles led me to believe it was the name of both). Anyway, there’s a young man there named Ting (played by Tony Jaa) who is working hard to prove himself as a master of Muay Thai Kickboxing, or Thai Fist. That’s quite enough bullshit for a young man to have on his mind but then some other asshole has to sneak in and cut off the head of their buddha statue so he can sell it. All the old ladies start crying that the town is not protected anymore so before you know it this little old country boy is headed for big bad Bangkok to get the shit back.

He teams up with Dirty Balls, a smalltime fuckup he thinks he knows from back in the day. This guy is a likable doofus who looks a little too old to be wearing hoop earrings and camoflauge pants, but what can you do. Also some teenage girl who rides motorcycles and cheats at cards, has a junkie sister, etc. I’m not sure what she contributes to the team other than scenes where people die, she cries and screams out how upset she is. Anyway they track the asshole with the head, get in some fights and chases and all that kind of business. There is this club that is kind of like a cross between Coyote Ugly and Fight Club. The sexy bartenders are all dancing and smiling and everybody’s enjoying themselves, but right in the middle of the floor there are brutal kickboxing matches going on and everybody’s betting on it. Of course, Ting accidentally gets involved and knocks out the champion with a single blow. (Bitch.)

I don’t want to say more because I don’t want to give away the story. It would be a shame not to be able to go into this thing fresh, because the real delight is in all the sly narrative twists and turns and– No, I’m just jerkin your chain. There’s nothing to give away. The story is just an excuse to string together a series of badass fight scenes and stunt sequences. And that’s a good thing.

I mean when was the last time you saw a really impressive FIGHT movie? Where the plot and characters were about as imaginative as a drive to work, but nobody ever cared because the fights were so god damned great? Bruce Lee mastered these movies, Sonny Chiba made some, Jet Li and Jackie Chan used to make them all the time. Did you really care if Jackie caught the bad guys in Rumble in the Bronx, or did you just want to see him jumping through shopping carts and pinball machines and swinging around pool cues and shit? That’s right the answer is B. This is that type of movie, although I also gotta say that it is a tiny bit less cheesy, the bad guys are a little less corny (except for a couple of those token english speaking kiwi cheeseballs), and thankfully it is not shot in Vancouver. It’s slicker. A little bit. But not in a bad way.

But that’s irrelevant. What matters is the fights, and these are real good ones. This is a style of fighting I have not seen in movies before. We’ve all gotten used to people dancing around on wires and doing all that flying kung fu shit, and sure that stuff is enjoyable when they do it right. This is the exact opposite though. There are no wires and no computers. This stuff is not elegant. This stuff is hard. It’s all about quick, powerful, jerking movements. If kung fu is like swinging a sword, this is like swinging a sledge hammer. It just looks painful. Sure, there’s a lot of flipping and jumping, but there’s no flitting around trying to be quiet and nimble. This stuff is about WHAM and WHACK. It’s blunt. They use their elbows and their knees. One of the fights is ended when Ting stands on a guy’s shoulders and smashes his skull open with an elbow. Ouch.

There’s a couple broken bones and windows, so Seagal would be proud.

In between the fights there’s a little bit of plot, and in between the plot there are chases. One of them involves about 15 or 20 three-wheeled taxis. Because of their inferior design, almost all of them flip over immediately. Others end up driving off one of those pesky unfinished freeway overpass motherfuckers always leave open to traffic in the movies. I’m not a libelous person but man there ought to be a major class action lawsuit going on here in my opinion.

Maybe the best scene in the whole movie though is early on when a bunch of angry thugs chase Ting through an outdoor market. This is just an excuse for him to jump over and through things, sometimes doing the splits, other times curling himself into a ball or an arrow or some other flying object. He jumps over a crowd of kids, a rack of sharp objects, a pan of frying chicken. He somersaults on top of roofs and slides under SUVS and best of all leaps through a roll of barbed wire. And as far as you can tell, he really did that shit. (Though he doesn’t rewind it and announce that, like Dolemite did in The Human Tornado.) It’s the kind of rush you used to get from Jackie Chan movies before Hollywood fucked Jackie’s brain with its evil alien genitalia and impregnated his brain with the filthy seed of mediocrity and laziness. Bastards.

I’m not saying that the other styles of martial arts movies are no longer valid. But I think most of us agree that the genre is becoming stale, with too much emphasis on special effects and pretty boy pop stars, and not enough on good old fashioned elbow grease and jawdropping physical feats. This is a good step in the other direction so hooray for Tony Jaa and the people of Thailand.

[ratings]