Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior was a bit over hyped

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior is a lower budget martial arts film from Thailand. French writer/director Luc Besson (The Professional, The Transporter) is an uncredited producer of this film, and I understand that he helped to re-edit this movie for a wider release. I first heard about this film on AintItCoolNews.com when the site’s owner, Harry Knowles, chose it among his top DVD picks for August. I think Harry liked the movie a whole lot more than I did.

The story behind this movie is right out of a video game. In fact, this movie plays a lot like a movie adaptation of a video game, which normally isn’t a good thing. Like most uninspired action movies, there is very little character development, even less dialogue, and lots of action and stunts. It’s the brilliant stunt work, which is both wire and CG-free, that make this movie worth seeing. The lead actor, Tony Jaa, jumps around like a human Spider-Man. This guy might seriously be the new Jackie Chan.

Tony Jaa’s character is from a small Thai village that has a special ceremony every 20-something years and it involves a Buddha statue they own. When some thugs come in and cut the head off the statue, the villagers all think their fate is doomed unless someone can go retrieve the head before the deadline for their quarter-century ceremony. What makes Jaa’s character special is that he has spent most of his life training and mastering the techniques of a rare and lethal form of martial arts.

As soon as his training his complete, Jaa’s master instructs him to never use it. Huh? Another character quickly explains that the master killed someone with that same technique and that’s why he decided to become a monk. So…he learned this cool technique and then turned around and used it to kill someone...so now he repents his sins by becoming a monk and…teaching other young people how to do the same technique that got him in all the trouble. Right…I just wanted to make sure I had that straight. By the end of the movie, none of this comes into play, thus making that whole scene a waste of time.

Naturally, Jaa’s character agrees to go into the city and retrieve the head. As soon as he gets there, he finds the small-time loser thug son of one of the village elders, and Jaa enlists his help. This leads him to fight in an underground club where he makes a big splash by taking out the reigning champion with one swift knee to the chest. All this does is attract a lot of unwanted attention, especially from the group of people involved in stealing the head from the statue.

Once Jaa gets into town and the action begins, you could probably print the rest of the dialogue on a single sheet of paper. The action sequences are very cool even if they do get old during the club fights. The best sequence is toward the beginning and involves a long foot chase where Jaa’s character jumps over, under, and through a series of obstacles as he escapes the thugs. Each fight goes on a little too long, though I will admit there are some truly cool moves captured on film. The director used an annoying editing method where instead of showing a cool stunt in one flowing motion, you get to see the same stunt two or three times from different camera angles. This poor editing technique is one of the surefire signs of a B-movie.

In short, I think Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior was kind of a cool movie, but way over hyped. I was expecting some kind of moving epic but instead just got another run of the mill Asian movie about good guys and street thugs. The stunts and fights were sometimes cool to watch, but we all know that stuff gets tiresome without a good story behind it.

The DVD does have quite a few cool extra features, including live demonstrations of Tony Jaa performing some of the moves seen in this movie. If you really liked this movie, you’ll probably enjoy the extra features. I just skimmed over them. The English subtitles don’t seem to be very accurate either, and often just shows [Speaking Thai] while characters mumble, as if there were no translation.