Ong-Bak Review

I first heard about this movie on AICN. It got rave reviews at their annual movie marathon event, but I largely ignored it until I saw a trailer. Then I was hooked. I'm a big Jackie Chan fan, especially his earlier movies which involve ridiculous stunts and fight scenes. Jet Li is cool, but his movies tend to employ wire-fu to some extent or another, which is fine, as long as it's explained within the context of the movie. I like Chan more because, at least in all his early movies, it's actually him doing those stunts. He actually does jump across an alley from the top of a building onto a fire escape. He actually does hang from a helicopter. And he actually does all those cool fighting moves. So Ong-Bak was exciting for me because the star, Tony Jaa, was sold as the heir to that tradition of no stuntmen and no wires, and I'll be damned if it didn't deliver big-time.

First things first: don't go to this movie looking for plot. You'll find just enough to justify the crazy fight and chase scenes, but nothing more than that. Also, you'd be well advised to check any "He couldn't survive that" or "There's no way he could fight after that" attitude at the door, as there are several moments toward the end of the film where both the good and bad guys overcome serious injury to fight at what appears to be their peak ability. One last thing: I found the ending a little confusing. The head of Ong-Bak (the diety/Buddha of a small town that was stolen at the beginning of the movie) has been recovered, the bad guys vanguished, etc., but supposedly at the cost of one of the good guys. But then the scene switches back to the small village and the celebration that the head had to be recovered for. Riding on one of the elephants is someone who looks very much like the guy who you supposed dead a few seconds ago. But they don't confirm this in any way, and I was left wondering if it was that character, or just some monk who looked like him.

There, that's done.

Now, the reason to see this movie: it rocks. The action is fantastic: the fight scenes are very well done, and the chase scene in the middle has some of the most ridiculous stunts I've ever seen. You won't actually believe they did them at first, but the director thought of this problem and decided to show all of the most spectacular stunts in triplicate, and from different angles, just to convince you that absolutely no tickery was used to make it easier for Jaa. I can't even imagine what the blooper reel looks like, but it was worth it, because your jaw will hit the floor about a dozen times before you walk out of the theater. In that chase sequence, Jaa does flips off people, tables, cars, and everything else, jumps through a hoop of barbed wire not much bigger than a basketball hoop, does a sideways flip between two panes of glass that I probably couldn't even get through, and slides a truck by doing a full split, all at top speed. It's amazing. Then, there are the fight sequences. Brilliantly done with some of the most massive hits I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure a lot of stuntmen were very sore after filming this, because it looks like they erred on the side of judiciously hitting them as opposed to judiciously missing them. In fact, the realism is driven home in the first scene, where all the young men of this small village compete to see who can climb a tall tree, retrieve a flag at the top, and then get back down. No big deal, you say? Well, it would be if it weren't full contact tree climbing. The ground around the base of the tree has clearly been dug up, and if they were nice they put mattresses or something under the dirt, but it can't possibly have mattered that much when you still fall from 20 feet in the air, sometimes hitting many large branches on the way down.

This is Tony Jaa's first movie, so it's a little early to crown him as the next great martial arts star, but with the stuff he pulled off in Ong-Bak, you'd be crazy to say that he couldn't be. His next movie, Tom Yum Goong, is filming now (according to IMDB), so I suggest we all wait until we've seen a little bit more of him before the inevitable Jaa vs Chan vs Li vs Lee questions come up. Be careful if you're squeamish about seeing people's heads get cracked by an elbow, but if you like action movies at all, Ong-Bak is the best pure action you're likely to see for a while.