Action movie offers outstanding boxing sequences
Early in the movie Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior, Ting (played by Tony Jaa), a young martial arts master from a small Thai village, shows off his fighting forms to his master. With precise, graceful movements, Ting demonstrates the strength, power and grace built into his fighting stye, Muay Thai.
Tony Jaa faces off against an opponent in 'Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior,' a film that draws elements from the works of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
The moves are impressive, but more impressive is that in later fight scenes, I was able to recognize some of them being incorporated into the fight. Many actors have mastered the art of the twirly arms and kicking legs that passes on screen for actual fighting, but its rare to see how martial arts really works. Jaa demonstrates his moves in the form practice, then, when confronted with a real fight, it is impressive to watch as he mixes and matches the forms with astonishing speed and fluidity. As in the best fight scenes of Bruce Lee, Jaa seems to be responding in real-time to moves thrown at him, and that spontaneity gives the fight scenes a freshness missing from many martial arts films. The fights didn't seem as rehearsed as in other martial arts films. I also appreciated the fact that the fights are brutally honest in their depictions of fighting as sometimes being nothing more than one human applying a brutal smackdown on another.
The story is a kickboxing fable of good and evil. When antiquity hunters steal the head of the village's idol, named Ong-Bak, Ting volunteers to follow the thieves to Bangkok in an attempt to retrieve it in time for the village's upcoming festival, which is only held every 24 years.
In Bangkok, Ting's search leads him to a back-alley fighting club where Jaa vanquishes an increasingly deadly series of opponents. This earns him the enmity of a local kingpin, who loses millions in bets.
The rest of the movie is chase and fight, chase and fight, following in the filmic steps of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Jaa's staging of the fights, as noted, often favors the purist sensibilities of Lee, but he also showcases an acrobatic athleticism obviously modeled on Chan, whose best martial arts moves are employed when he's desperately trying to avoid a fight. Jaa emulates Chan in a couple of extended chase sequences in which Jaa dives over, under, through and between a series of obstacles as he attempts to get away. It's amusing, though, that for all his dexterity, he never does seem to gain ground on his pursuers, who basically barrel right over the very same obstacles.
His screen presence, however, seems modeled more on Jet Li's simmering intensity. Ting is basically easy going until he has to act, which he does with cobra-strike quickness.
The contrast between the comedy scenes and the stark brutality of some of the fights can be disorienting at times, and the film gradually comes to look like what it really is: a showcase reel, Jaa's calling card to Hollywood. He has every right to make such a calling card, but Ong-Bak suffers as a whole from the attempt to showcase too many styles and abilities. While he's waiting for Hollywood to discover him, Jaa should also be trying to make more films in the interim; he has a lot more dues to pay before he's ready for the big-time. Throughout the film's action scenes, Jaa is astonishing to watch, but he still has much to learn about acting; in non-action scenes he doesn't yet match the pure screen charisma of Lee, Chan or Li.
Still, I give him credit and gratitude for his effort to bring some of Bruce Lee's purity back to fighting, and presenting it as a very serious contest. In the best of Lee's films, he treated his martial arts skills as a bag of tricks he could draw on when needed: "Hmmm, this opponent favors quick attacks & retreats, and has a huge reach advantage; I'll counter it with this strategy!" You could see Lee constantly sizing up and formulating his response, faster, sometimes, than the eye could follow. Jaa has that same ability in his fight scenes, and it would be nice to see him continue in this vein.
A lot has been made of the fact that there were no wires or special effects used in the film, but this is really not as unusual as it might seem. Lots of Hong Kong movies for years have featured stunts that are just as bone-crunching; however, even realizing that films are about illusion, there are some stunts in the film which could only have been accomplished by the actors committing themselves to taking a hard and painful fall.
One other quibble about Ong-Bak is that a film with a story this thin has no business being more than 100 minutes long. This should be an 80 minute movie, but it's puffed out with a couple of chase and action scenes too many.
The most interesting thing about Ong-Bak is that here, in the year 2005, it should be receiving even the minor studio release treatment that it is. Twenty-five years ago, back when there was still a fast-fleeting diversity in movie distribution, this film would have shown up with little fanfare in a double or triple feature bill at whichever independent theater in town specialized in Chop-Socky films. The film would have begun with the Shaw Brothers logo, Jaa would have totally kicked ass, and 25 years later, Quentin Tarantino would have been working references to it into his movies.