Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior
Opening April 8 at the Belcourt Theatre
Ong-Bak—as in the title Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior—refers to a Thai village's spiritual protector. I do not know the literal translation, but my guess would be "he who fights with refrigerator." Let me explain. The hero, Ting, goes looking for the baddie who swiped his village's stone deity. He winds up in a Bangkok fight club where life is cheap but wagers are high.
Ting doesn't want to whup ass, but if ass-whupping is called for, so be it. His specialty is muay thai—a style that culls the best moves from kickboxing, breakdancing and backyard wrestling, only with a little something extra (mostly elbows). The first opponent to fall is some laughable Twisted Sister character who goes down in a hail of hair. Next comes some goofball with a modified 'fro and quaintly fancy footwork—the Morris Day of the death-match circuit. Ting shows him some jungle love. He's walking away when a burly dude at the bar unfurls his tattoos and throws down. After a little foreplay—a lamp to the forehead, a table to the skull—the dude picks up a refrigerator and wallops the hero.
This is the point at which martial-arts fans will realize that Ong-Bak, a Thai import that's been dropping jaws on the festival circuit for almost two years, is more precious than Oscar gold. This is the point at which Ting, having been hit with a refrigerator, gives the creep a taste of his own Frigidaire and mashes him through a wall. Then Ting takes the both of them out the club's plate-glass window. This precipitates a two-story fall. It is a testament to this movie's genius that while they are falling, amid a shower of broken glass, Ting spends the whole way down still beating the guy's ass like a snare drum.
Ting is played by Tony Jaa, a lithe whirling dervish who combines the coiled fury of Bruce Lee with the point-blank thuggery of a thick-waisted bruiser—a Sonny Chiba. Even if he kinda resembles a Thai Michael Jackson, I believe "bad-ass motherfucker" is le mot juste. He does his own stunts, and the director, Prachya Pinkaew, just sits around thinking of ways to give his insurance agent a coronary. There's a foot chase in which two dozen stone-cold killers pursue Ting down a crowded street. In one shot, Jaa leaps and does a vertical split, clearing a moving car by centimeters; in another, he does a sprinting cartwheel between plates of glass a foot apart. The man risks death just to make us hoot and holler.
And this, no joke, restores some of my faith in movies. The early silents thrived on the athleticism of Keaton and Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks; at the century's end, Jackie Chan and Jet Li produced the same delighted gasps at what a human being is capable of doing. CGI spectacle is fine, but where's the exertion, the sense of physical dexterity and accomplishment? I get a bigger kick out of watching Tony Jaa execute a low-tech Luddite flip over a sizzling pot than seeing a digitized Keanu Reeves fight a zillion Agent Smiths.
There are elegant martial-arts mood pieces—the dreamy wuxia reveries of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou—and then there are head-busting, skull-cracking human demolition orgies, where the only dialogue of note is something like, "Your kung-fu is no match for mine—you bastard! Heh heh heh." You won't see any color-coding or Echo Games in Ong-Bak. The fights here have a bone-crunching solidity, and the filmmakers even dare to withhold the mayhem for the first half-hour. But at that point, the movie builds, and builds, and builds until the sky is filled with exploding three-wheeled taxis and the hero is delivering flying kicks with his flaming legs.
Ong-Bak literally scrawls its blockbuster ambitions on the scenery. One graffiti message reads, "Hi Luc Besson we are waiting for you," while a table fight reveals a wall marked, "Hi Spielberg let's do it together." Better, though, that Hollywood and Gaulywood action yarns should emulate this one: at its Toronto premiere two years ago, it was received as if it were the awesomest movie in the history of awesomeness. If gewgaws like plot, dialogue and character development are all you want, by all means skip Ong-Bak. Plenty of movies offer those, but name another that features men slugging it out with refrigerators.
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