Grade: B+
Half an hour into “Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior” I thought I’d made a terrible mistake.
The movie was impossible to follow and appeared to have been shot by blind kids with a Super 8 camera. Shots were out of focus, characters were often indistinguishable because of poor lighting, and the story was so puzzling the audience laughed repeatedly.
At first we did so embarrassingly, because this is a foreign film, and thus deserving of our utmost attention; then we laughed because “Ong-Bak” is almost as tonally catchy as 2003’s smile-fest “School of Rock.” And where that movie struck a chord (ba-zing!) through fist-pumping rock anthems, “Ong-Bak” recognizes the importance of a good ass-beating.
It’s the old fish-out-of-water tale, as Ting must go to Bangkok to save the Buddha head that was stolen from his small Thai village. Once there, Ting gets caught up in the wrong crowd at a fight club populated by geeky American ex-pats and ruthless villains, including a trachea-smoking voice boxer and a maniac who destroys a building in his attempt to kill Ting.
Ting, of course, is proficient in the martial arts technique of Muay Thai. This type of combat is heavy on punching people in the skull with your elbows and may have some unfortunate drunken imitations. Muay Thai is also prone to instant replays, which are initially hilarious and then become undeniably awesome with each escalating stunt.
But director Prachya Pinkaew has no sense of style — he uses none of the special effects or nifty camera movement that has populated recent Asian action films. Pinkaew films Yeerum’s amazing feats from a medium-shot distance, allowing us to be impressed by the man, not the movie. What Pinkaew may lack in technical prowess is compensated by “Ong-Bak’s” cartoonish humor, including an instant-classic knife-selling gag and a Burmese fighter whose passion for fast-action steroids constitutes the funniest scene of 2005.
— Kyle Smith