When the head of a religious statue, the Ong-Bak of the title, is stolen by a man from Bangkok Ting (Tony Jaa) volunteers to find it and return it to the village. Arriving in the city Ting meets Humlae, a young man who left the village to make his fortune in Bangkok but instead has become a gambler and petty conman. With Humlae’s help Ting tracks down the missing Ong-Bak while along the way he gets caught up in an illegal fighting ring (luckily he’s proficient in Muay Thai) and Humlae finds redemption.
I’d heard a lot about Tony Jaa and his breakthrough film, from Jaa being dubbed the new Bruce Lee to the bone crunching fight scenes. Would the film live up to all the hype? The answer is yes…and no. Jaa is indeed an amazing talent; he combines the gymnastic stunts of Jackie Chan with a brutal fighting style. He’s doesn’t really get much chance to show he can act but he does what’s required – move fast , hit hard and look good.
So what’s wrong with the film? Put simply, the editing sucks. The film features what could have been the greatest chase scene every filmed, what stops it achieving that is the way it’s been edited. Clearly the filmmakers realised they had some amazing stunt work here and decided that if showing a jaw dropping moment once was good, showing it two, and sometimes three, times would be even better. Wrong! What this does is ruin the flow of the fight and pull the viewer out of the film. The chase is the worst example but this attempt to exploit the stunt work is evident in almost all the fight scenes.
The French seem to have a thing for loose remakes of John Carpenter films; Florent Emilio Siri made The Nest (2002) that had much in common with Assault on Precinct 13, and District B13 is a French take on Carpenter’s Escape from New York. What sets these films apart from Hollywood-style remakes is that they only take the basic idea and use it as a springboard to create a new and exciting story.
