Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior
The latest contestant for the title of the New Bruce Lee is Panom Yeerum, better known as Tony Jaa. He's from Thailand, he has a soulful simmer that puts a viewer in mind of the young Jimmy Smits, and he can flatten an attacker using parts of his limbs that you or I have never bothered to consider. Lee may have had his fists of fury, but Tony Jaa has inner forearms of rage.
Jaa's breakout donnybrook is "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," a 2003 release that set box-office records in his home country and elsewhere in East Asia and that arrives in Boston theaters today. You can see why it made a splash. The action scenes in "Ong-Bak" are gasp-inducing examples of a local strain of martial arts known as Muay Thai, a.k.a. "the Nine Body Weapons." (This explains the forearms, as well as the knees, elbows, and calves.) Filmed by director Prachya Pinkaew with both brutality and grace, these sequences are four-star examples of cinematic mayhem that can stand with anything by Lee, Jackie Chan, or Jet Li.
Unfortunately, the plot and the acting in "Ong-Bak" rate a star and a half. You do the math.
The film opens with a lulu of a sequence: a contest in a rural village in which the men race to the top of a tall tree to capture a banner. If you want a rival out of the way, you just throw him off a branch, and Pinkaew indelicately films the losers hitting the ground with bone-rattling thuds. Into this macho country idyll comes a snake -- a prodigal son named Don (Wannakit Siriput) who steals the head of the local Buddha statue, called Ong-Bak, and carts it back to his gangster boss in Bangkok. The village sends its champion, the modest and deadly Ting (Jaa), to bring it home.
When Ting gets to town, he looks up his cousin George (Petchthai Wongkamlao, a comedian and TV star in Thailand), who turns out to be a peroxided hustler with a tomboy partner in crime named Muay Lek (Pumwaree Borrijindakul) and a scam for every street corner. These two drag Ting to the local "fight club," where he's drawn unwillingly into battling a hulking American nicknamed Pearl Harbor. Before anyone in the club or in the audience can register what has happened, Ting has laid the guy flat with a body block. A wholly appropriate moment of silence follows.
It's the chase scenes you take home with you, though. A local Mr. Big (Sukhaaw Phongwilal), who in one of the movie's more baroque curlicues can only speak through an electronic voicebox, sends his goons after Ting and company time and again, on foot, in cars, in the three-wheeled Bangkok taxis known as tuk-tuks. At times Jaa's feats of dexterity recall Buster Keaton -- not the comic acrobat that Jackie Chan likes to channel, but the somber genius of dynamic movement. Jackknifing over parked cars, diving through hoops of barbed wire, careening down scaffolding like a human pinball, or leaping up to deliver a kick while his pants are on fire, Jaa at times simply defies belief.
A sizable amount of national pride is on display in "Ong-Bak." The star's opponents in the fight club sequences are Australian, American, Burmese -- anything but Thai. More to the point, they're all cartoon villains, richly deserving of such deadly martial arts moves as Foot Strokes Face and Bolting Horse. A cardboard thinness shows up as well in the hokey dialogue, the shopworn characterizations, and in the movie's refusal to do anything interesting with Borrijindakul's wild-card vibrancy. The climactic fight scene goes on for a punishing 13 minutes, and by its end you've simply reached the limits of what action movies can do. After a while, a punch is a punch is a punch.
There's also the curious notion that all this pugilism is being done in the name of one of the more peace-oriented religious figures to have walked the earth. Despite his stated mission to bring back the head of Ong-Bak, Ting never really stops to ask himself, "What would Buddha do?" If he did, I'm not sure that crushing an enemy's skull with a giant stone bodhisattva would be the correct answer.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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