Ok, what the hell was all that about? Ong Bak was great. It reinvented martial arts films and blew anything that was coming from Hong Kong out of the water. It introduced us to Tony Jaa an all round stunt expert and master of exreme fighting choreography and bone crunching action. Ong Bak was followed up by Tom Yung Goong which, let`s face it, was just more of the same but with added action, stunts and even more extreme bone crunching goodness. So, when making his third film, Tony Jaa coulddn`t possibly go wrong, could he.
Err, yes, it would appear he could. The making of the film was hampered somewhat when Tony, now acting as star, choreographer, director, producer, story writer and probably half the other jobs on the average film crew, threw a Hollywood style temper tantrum at not having enough money for the film and vanished into the Thai jungle for several months, essentially hoilding the film to ransom, only reappearing when he got his way. Unfortunately it would appear that Tony has started to belive his owen press, that he is the second coming of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and half a dozen martial arts greats all rolled into one, and thinks anything he does will turn to gold. Ong Bak 2 proves the point very well, that a good film is a team effort and Tony is only a part of it. Judging from this film, he very much needs other people to handle the story, directing etc. in particualr Prachya Pinkaew, diretcor of his earlier 2 films.
Ong Bak 2 is, to be frank, rather dull. It tries to be a bit different, which is admirable enough, but people don`t come to see films like this for long winded story and Thai dance sequences (Ong Bak 2 film features a good 5 minute sequence of someone just dancing just to reintorduce a character when 20 seconds of vaguely well written story could have done the job just as wll). Audiences want to see people get beaten real good, limbs snapped and skulls crunched with elbows. And when you have to wait 48 minutes into a 95 minute film for anything like that to begin, you know something`s wrong. Ok, there are a few smaller action sequences before this but they are rather dull and uninspiring. Plus there aren`t any stunts - certainly nothing to rival Tony jumping though hoops of barbed wire, under cars or up glass walls, backflipping over a quad bike in the process. But I think the biggest problem is that Tony decided to concentrate on the use of weapons in this film (swords mainly, flails, and other bits occasionally) and he doesn`t seem to be able to do anything differnet with them. When he`s fighting woth a sword, it`s nothing new; nothing we haven`t seen Jet Li, Samo Hung, Donnie Yen (the list goes on) do a thousand times before. It`s only when he empties his hands and starts with his fists, kness and elbows that things begin to improve. But by then it`s too little too late and the film just suddenly ends with a spectacularly tenuous link to the first Ong Bak, leaving the audience with a spectacular WTF moment.
I believe his next film is Ong Bak 3 which will be a sequel to this film. With a bit of luck Tony will have eaten a large portion of humble pie by the time the cameras roll (but not so much that he too fat to pull off some great stunts).
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