Starring: Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Pumwaree Yodkamol, Suchao Pongwilai, Cheathavuth Watcharakhun, Wannakit Sirioput
For the last week and a bit I've been a bit snowed under with essay marking, so didn't watch a movie for nine days (that's the longest I've gone in a while). My brother is a big fan of martial arts movies and lent me one from his private collection which he highly recommended, Ong-Bak. I haven't seen a lot of proper martial arts movies so for the sake of variety was keen to give this one a look.
Ting (Jaa) lives in a small and peaceful village which has been ravaged by drought. They are preparing for the upcoming anniversary vigil in which they will be blessed with rain, but these plans are thrown into chaos when the head of their sacred statue of Ong-Bak, central to the vigil, is stolen by a young villager called Don (Sirioput) who is trying to gain favour with Bangkok crime lord, Khom Tuan (Pongwilai). Ting is sent by the village to the seedy underbelly of Bangkok to recover their Ong-Bak. He meets up with George (Wongkamlao), a son of one of the villagers, who now lives in Bangkok. But George has been corrupted by the city doesn't seem interested in helping. That is until he sees Ting fight and realises that there could be money made off him. By fighting at underground boxing gatherings Ting is able to work his way into the Bangkok underworld and closer to retrieving Ong-Bak.
A lot of the publicity material surrounding Ong-Bak made comparisons between Jaa and Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, claiming Jaa was the heir apparent. I haven't seen any of Bruce Lee's films, but I've seen a fair bit of Jackie Chan and I'll say this: Tony Jaa has all of the physical ability of Jackie Chan with none of the charisma. I found that as much as I was impressed with the things that he was doing, there was nothing engaging about him as an actor. His character was really two-dimensional and simply uninteresting. Obviously the filmmakers knew Jaa's limitations in preparing the project because while all of the films action sequences revolve around him, none of the films overly emotional moments feature him. The character who we really watch go through a journey, or what we would consider a traditional character arc, is Wongkamlao's George. His is the character who develops and changes. Jaa's is the character who punches and kicks.
While the film is really about devoting as much time to action as possible, there is a plot there, but it is of minimal importance. The early scenes in the village establish the plot through some excruciatingly bad exposition. Almost every line in the early scenes have no purpose other than to explain things to the audience; the importance of the Ong-Bak statue, the deadliness of Muay Thai fighting, Ting's vow not to fight for money, and so on. It is hard to know, when you are watching a film with subtitles, whether the dialogue is as stilted in the original language or whether it has lost something in translation, but there don't appear to have been too many drafts written of the script before they found something they could work with. After we've left the village the plot takes a back seat, with only the occasional line to remind us the reason Ting is in Bangkok.
The plot is decent, but unimportant. The dialogue is woeful and the acting is only fractionally better, but who cares. It doesn't matter. That's not what Ong-Bak is about. Ong-Bak is about action and the film delivers bucket loads of it. Ong-Bak was a real reboot for the flagging martial arts film industry and is a must see for action fans. If you're not really a martial arts fan, there's not a lot else there, but that being said I'm not a big martial arts guy either and I couldn't help but be impressed by the physical feats on display.
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