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ONG BAK, the new Thai action movie starring Tony Jaa, is about as close as you're likely to come to seeing a video game come to life without the use of special effects. Part of this is because of the acrobatic talents of Jaa, a Thai boxing expert who's capable of seemingly impossible moves and jumps. The other reason, however, is the wafer-thin plot that's merely an excuse to get Jaa into as many fight-to-the-death matches against as many hyped-up, drugged out, and just flat-out insane opponents as possible. Not that I'm complaining. After all, how can you have a problem with a movie that features a larynxless villain who smokes cigarettes through a hole in his throat; one opponent who uses chairs, tables, electrical sockets and even a refrigerator as weapons; and another opponent who injects adrenaline directly into his heart to pump himself up? That's right—you can't. Just when you think the film can't go any further over the top, director Prachya Pinkaew finds a way to take the film to another level of insanity. The ostensible plot concerns the theft of a religious artifact, the Ong Bak of the title, from a remote Thai village and Ting's (Jaa) trip to the urban chaos that is Bangkok to retrieve it. Once there, he looks up a villager's son, played by Petchthai Wongkamlao, to help him in his quest, but the character in question has become a con artist only interested in enriching himself. Ting perseveres, however, and reluctantly becomes involved in a series of underground death matches in order to get back Ong Bak. Pinkaew's background is in directing music videos and it shows in the quick cuts and hyper-kinetic action of the death matches and various chases. One of the best sequences in the film has Jaa being chased through a market by a gang of thugs and eluding them by taking advantage of the props and people around him. The scene is reminiscent of some of Jackie Chan's work but achieves a level of originality by incorporating traditional Thai boxing moves, with all their elbow and knee-crunching action, into the scene. And just like in a video game, hypnotic music accompanies the fighting and particularly nice and/or bone-crunching moves are shown twice and sometimes three times in succession just in case you missed them the first time. Watching ONG BAK, I had a similar feeling to when I watched BATTLE ROYALE, the Takeshi "Beat" Kitano-directed film about kids on a jungle island forced to kill each other off by sadistic adults. Whether becuse of different moral standards or fears of lawsuits by outraged parents, ONG BAK and BATTLE ROYALE are both films that would never get made by mainstream movie studios in the West. And that's part of the thrill of ONG BAK—seeing things on screen that you've never seen before. email this review to a friend
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