01-04-2006, 04:04 PM
Tony Jaa's latest is disappointing. Three words: too much plot. Tony still has the moves. There's some great fights, including an amazing single-shot scene where Tony works his way up past dozens of guards that runs for nearly five minutes without a cut. It's brilliant choreography - simple fights because he has to do so much with clever ways set up for him to catch his breath, and lots of broken stuff. The single shot makes it amazing because the break so much stuff, they have basically one take. John Woo did something similar with Hard Boiled. There's also a great capoiera vs. muay thai fight, a nice chase scene for Tony to show off his acrobatics, and a mass breaking of arms and legs fight. There's also big time wrestlers and a dominitrix with a whip. Yep, this is a good ol' kung fu movie, even if it's muay thai.
The plot is rather dull, filled with attempts to show what fine people the Thai are and how they love their elephants. It's like there's this story that makes little sense, then suddenly Tony appears and kicks a lot of ass. At that point, why bother with the story? Petchtai Wongkamlao costars again, Dirty Balls from Ong Bak. More important, Panna Rittikrai choreographs. Jaa was part of Panna Rittikrai's stunt team, and has several past films that are only available in Thai VCD now, no subtitles. See
http://www.tonyjaa.org/merchandises.shtml. Spirited Killer is soon to be released in US DVD, brought to us by the same people who brought us Shaolin Dolemite, which means I should be able to secure a viewers copy.
Tom Yum Goong references a restaurant, so we weren't tripping about it being a kind of soup. The restaurant premise is absurd, but who cares about that? The movie is in Thai, of course, but set in Australia, so there's large portions of English and Mandarin dialog (the villains mostly). The subtitled version I have goes in and out, and is useless, although rather funny when it's English subtitles for English dialog and it's not even close. Note that the English and Mandarin portions also have Thai subtitles, which overlap the English ones, not that they were readible anyway. Note that my version is an illegal bootleg, a DVD-R from a VCD, I think, and there may be some omissions. The official release is not yet available.
So it's not really worthy of a DOOM showing, in my mind, unless we just fast forward to the fight scenes.
The plot is rather dull, filled with attempts to show what fine people the Thai are and how they love their elephants. It's like there's this story that makes little sense, then suddenly Tony appears and kicks a lot of ass. At that point, why bother with the story? Petchtai Wongkamlao costars again, Dirty Balls from Ong Bak. More important, Panna Rittikrai choreographs. Jaa was part of Panna Rittikrai's stunt team, and has several past films that are only available in Thai VCD now, no subtitles. See
http://www.tonyjaa.org/merchandises.shtml. Spirited Killer is soon to be released in US DVD, brought to us by the same people who brought us Shaolin Dolemite, which means I should be able to secure a viewers copy.
Tom Yum Goong references a restaurant, so we weren't tripping about it being a kind of soup. The restaurant premise is absurd, but who cares about that? The movie is in Thai, of course, but set in Australia, so there's large portions of English and Mandarin dialog (the villains mostly). The subtitled version I have goes in and out, and is useless, although rather funny when it's English subtitles for English dialog and it's not even close. Note that the English and Mandarin portions also have Thai subtitles, which overlap the English ones, not that they were readible anyway. Note that my version is an illegal bootleg, a DVD-R from a VCD, I think, and there may be some omissions. The official release is not yet available.
So it's not really worthy of a DOOM showing, in my mind, unless we just fast forward to the fight scenes.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse