watch this movie or die
http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/theprotector/hd/
If you don't know who Tony Jaa is, you're missing out. If you haven't seen Ong Bak: Thai Warrior (see IGN.com review of Ong Bak: Thai Warrior - "Tony Jaa for King of the Universe"), you're missing out on even more. Ong Bak is a film that revolutionized martial arts action flicks. Unfortunately, even though it made a small theatrical release, it didn't hit big due to their advertising budget and it has only gained a cult following. It's main star Tony Jaa (known internationally as Panom Yeerum, his Thai name) is the premeire future martial arts superstar. Tony Jaa is Jackie Chan multiplied by Jet Li to the power of Chow Yun Fat/Sammo Hung/Donnie Yen/all the other semi-famous martial arts guys. If you put him in a ring with fifty black belts he'd kill them all without breaking a sweat. He'd even destroy a team of Chuck Norris, Jack Bauer, and pre-musician Steven Segal. I'm serious.
Imagine seeing the Matrix, the scene where Neo fights all the Agent Smiths, except there are no wires or computer generated moves. All the high-flying action and stunts done WITHOUT tricking the viewer to think it's real because it is actually real. Because Ong Bak is a Thai film, it's budget wasn't very high and so there are no dollars for stunt doubles, wires, or computer animations. In Ong Bak, Tony Jaa jumps through a circle of barbed wire the size of a watermelon, flips through two glass windows the width of a human body (from the side view), literally HURDLES over the highest point of two cars, rips a guy's leg off with his bare hands, and does backflips, sick reversals, spinning kicks, and other crazily insane martial arts moves you've more than likely never seen before. And while he's taking a break from all this he's beating the shit out of people, usually in groups of more than ten.
This is only the 100th coolest move in Ong Bak
Tony Jaa is a ridiculous athlete, and it makes me wonder why he's not in professional competition. He could be a wide receiver in the NFL, and Ong Bak had such an influence on me that I'm going to try to learn muay thai lessons in the fall semester. That's another reason the movie is so sweet: not many people have actually seen muay thai/thai boxing because it's a relatively unknown martial art, especially in films where you see only wushu or fake karate. Utilizing hardpoints of the body, the elbows and knees, you can do serious, serious damage with the muay thai style, and Tony Jaa's moves just emphasize it even more.
His new movie, which is coming out on September 8, is The Protector, not to be confused with a Jackie Chan film by the same name. Featuring more ridiculous muay thai action and directed by Prachya Pinkaew, the director of Ong Bak, it seems like the movie has a similar "humble-warrior-from-small-village-must-venture-out-into-the-big-city-to-save-it" type of storyline. The fact that the movie is now Americanized may or may not hurt the film, although I think some of the computer generated effects I saw in the trailer takes away from the authenticity of it all. Also, another potential downfall of the film is that there's an advertisement at the end of the trailer that says "Original music by the RZA". When Jet Li started teaming up with rappers to do movies, his career quickly went into a downwards spiral, and it's currently inside a deep, deep, never-escaping, sarlacc-pit-like (though any true Star Wars fan can tell you that Boba Fett did actually escape the sarlacc - I'm not geeky because of this, it just means I'm smarter than you) black hole. However, there is one particular sweet part in the trailer that has Tony Jaa going up against some dude who knows capoeira, better known as "the breakdancing style" or "Eddy Gordo's style from Tekken 3". Tony Jaa has some capoeira skills of his own, and watching muay thai versus capoeira is sure to be a forever memorable scene. There's no doubt in my mind that it'll be the best action movie of the summer by quite a long shot and then some. Not only that, but it'll probably be the best martial arts flick since... who knows, maybe Hero? It's not a Matrix rip-off, there's no bullet time or any of that shit, it's just pure, unadulterated, unedited, asskicking muay thai action. Make sure you catch the movie.
And if you want to see Ong Bak, let me know, I'm getting that shit on DVD after I had to reset my computer and it was deleted from my hard drive.
Remember, SEPTEMBER 8. Yeah it's a Friday night, but you can always drink later and the parties don't start until 11 anyways.
More screens from Ong Bak to show you how sweet it is:
The sick part is, these pictures hardly do the movie justice.
posted by KTrain at 6:27 PM
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