The hardest part of watching this movie was that the action scenes were so good, but the story was painfully bad. You may want the DVD version so you can just skip through the story line to the beautifully choreographed fight scenes. The movie starts off with so much promise - great pictures of rural Thailand and majestic elephants, until its first departure from reality with the shooting by a local politician of Tony Jaa's (Kham) father, over the taking of the white elephant. Dude you are a politician, the guy is 70, you are surrounded by henchman, why the hell would you shoot an old man when you could easily just take the elephant? From here on Tony is chasing after the elephant kidnappers, which takes him to Sydney where he uncovers endangered species restaurant. He ends up fighting Xing Jing (Rose) the katoey (lady boy) evil head of the Chinese gang.
The best: the 4 minute single shot action scene. This alone makes the movie worth seeing. Starting at the bottom of a 5 story circling stair case, he works his way to the 5th floor kicking a ton of ass on the way. Buy the time he reached the first floor you begin to realize that the camera is following the action is on a single shot.
After possibly breaking the record for longest single cut action scene, Jaa goes for the most broken arms award turn up your speakers to hear every last crunch.
And then he goes for the first x-games fight scene. He takes on rollerbladers, BMXers, a trial bike rider and a 4 wheeler. Where are the skaters??? The biggest annoyances: - Petchtai Wongkamlao (Mark). He was in the first movie (Ong-Bok) and I was hoping it would be his last. While I found him totally annoying, the Thai audience seemed to laugh at him.
A singer from the band Loso does a little product placement for M-150 in one of the Australian shots.
And a blatant plug an Indian couple walking are the street are overheard, talking about how disgusting it is to buy pirated DVDs.
Conclusion- The movie is a must see for the action scenes really amazing and unique stuff. The story, unfortunately, was on par with a porno.. making you want to fast forward to the Tony Jaa scenes. Hopefully we'll see Jaa picked up by a different movie studio so that his work can really blossom.
The best: the 4 minute single shot action scene. This alone makes the movie worth seeing. Starting at the bottom of a 5 story circling stair case, he works his way to the 5th floor kicking a ton of ass on the way. Buy the time he reached the first floor you begin to realize that the camera is following the action is on a single shot.
After possibly breaking the record for longest single cut action scene, Jaa goes for the most broken arms award turn up your speakers to hear every last crunch.
And then he goes for the first x-games fight scene. He takes on rollerbladers, BMXers, a trial bike rider and a 4 wheeler. Where are the skaters??? The biggest annoyances: - Petchtai Wongkamlao (Mark). He was in the first movie (Ong-Bok) and I was hoping it would be his last. While I found him totally annoying, the Thai audience seemed to laugh at him.
- The fake new reports how can you possibly be doing English language news??? A few notes: Jackie Chan makes a brief cameo by bumping into Jaa in the airport. Nice touch.
A singer from the band Loso does a little product placement for M-150 in one of the Australian shots.
And a blatant plug an Indian couple walking are the street are overheard, talking about how disgusting it is to buy pirated DVDs.
Conclusion- The movie is a must see for the action scenes really amazing and unique stuff. The story, unfortunately, was on par with a porno.. making you want to fast forward to the Tony Jaa scenes. Hopefully we'll see Jaa picked up by a different movie studio so that his work can really blossom.