Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Ong-Bak 8/10
The Western world is rarely treated to martial arts gems these days. Jet Li is getting old, Jackie Chan is old ... and movies like Hero & Crouching Tiger are being tarred by the same brush (C'mon, Hero is not a martial arts flick. Enter The Dragon is a martial arts flick).
So watching this movie was such a welcome relief from artsy and chop-socky movies that I've watched over the last couple of years. It doesn't have much of a plot - village kid is sent to the big city to recover a stolen religious artifact, and gets involved with a local fight club. Watching the movie, audience reactions can be categorized as follows:
Why these reactions? After all, you find several outrageous stunts in Jackie Chan movies! The reason is that there are no stunt doubles, no CG, and no wires. So while there might be some artistic creativity (e.g.: dusting clothes so when people fall down, a huge billow of dust blows out, making audiences think it was a hard blow), you know its Tony Jaa (the lead) that just jumped through a 2ft coil of barbed wire!
The stunts are outrageous, and obviously downright dangerous. The fight club scenes would put any episode of Ultimate Fighting to shame, and its all a glorious voyeuristic pleasure to see people get twelve kinds of !@#$ kicked out of them.
If you like action movies, you will like Ong-Bak, and it's a movie you should not miss.
So watching this movie was such a welcome relief from artsy and chop-socky movies that I've watched over the last couple of years. It doesn't have much of a plot - village kid is sent to the big city to recover a stolen religious artifact, and gets involved with a local fight club. Watching the movie, audience reactions can be categorized as follows:
- Huh?
- What just happened?
- Cool!!
- Holy (expletive deleted)!!
- How did he do that?
- Awwwwwwww! (usually when some obviously painful stunt is performed)
- He did whaaaa?
Why these reactions? After all, you find several outrageous stunts in Jackie Chan movies! The reason is that there are no stunt doubles, no CG, and no wires. So while there might be some artistic creativity (e.g.: dusting clothes so when people fall down, a huge billow of dust blows out, making audiences think it was a hard blow), you know its Tony Jaa (the lead) that just jumped through a 2ft coil of barbed wire!
The stunts are outrageous, and obviously downright dangerous. The fight club scenes would put any episode of Ultimate Fighting to shame, and its all a glorious voyeuristic pleasure to see people get twelve kinds of !@#$ kicked out of them.
If you like action movies, you will like Ong-Bak, and it's a movie you should not miss.
