Tom Yum Goong was the original name of the film set for a September 9th release in the US, as "
The Protector." It's Tony Jaa's second major film release (he had bit and key parts in several very low budget films that are now being re-released) and the first film he's been in that had anything approaching modern production values. It's still not any good, at a film, but the fight scenes are incredibly good, better than the ones in Ong Bak, which was the best martial arts film I'd seen prior to this one.
This review is based on the import DVD, purchased some months before the film was (finally) released in the US, so the version most of you see in theaters or on DVD may be different. Frankly, I hope it is, since the version of TYG I saw was a complete mess, with an incredibly sprawling and unnecessary gangster/bad guy aspect to the plot, when no one really wants to see anything but more of Tony Jaa fighting and doing acrobatics.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
Tom Yum Goong, 2005 (AKA The Protector, AKA Ong Bak 2) 2005
Script/Story: 3
Characters: 4
Action: 9
Combat Realism: 8
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 8
Overall: 6
I was torn on my overall score, especially since
I gave Ong Bak a overenthusiastic 7.
Ong Bak wasn't that good a film; a real score for
Ong Bak for it would be about a 4, but the fighting was so good I elevated it substantially. It was an 8 or 9 for a martial arts/action fan, and about a 2 for anyone else.
TYG is a far better film than
Ong Bak, at least in terms of production values and budget and variety of fight scenes, and it has better/more fighting action, but it didn't have as much of a feeling of being fresh and never-before-seen. So I'm scoring it more realistically, in comparison to other mainstream films. As
chop socky, it would get a 9+. As a real film, it's about a 5, though one that non-martial arts fans would probably find unwatchable.
The fight scenes and action were outstanding, but as for the rest? Pretty much dreadful. The US release might be improved by some editing, since there was a lot of dead wood in the import version we saw on DVD, since we were unwilling to wait for the US theatrical release. The film we saw seemed to have been edited in almost random fashion. Numerous scenes (almost all that don't involve fighting) appear and end without making any real sense. There's a fight scene, then you're in an office with 10 characters you don't recognize, then some police shout at each other, then a bunch of characters are in a cemetery, then there's a helicopter shot of a jungle, then Tony Jaa walks into a warehouse and fights a bunch of rollerblading badguys, then some girl is in a mudbath with a police official, and so on.
It's all well-shot and well-lit and in-focus (all steps up from
Ong Bak's home movie quality production values) but the plot is scattered all over the place and the continuity of the scenes is quite suspect. It's basically too big a movie; the plot needs to stay focused on Tony Jaa and his quest to find his stolen elephants and get revenge on the bad guys who stole them. We don't need any of the long digressions featuring interchangeable Asian mafia bad guys, police department power struggles, random immigrant girls and their poverty problems, news reporters, etc. At least 50% of the non-fighting scenes could easily be jettisoned, and at 110 minutes, TYG would definitely have been improved by the removal of at least 20 minutes of nonessential bullshit.
StoryIn
TYG/The Defender, Tony Jaa is an innocent villager in Thailand or some other jungly-type Southeast Asian counry, he and his father raise and live with a female and male elephant, and their one son. They make and sell furniture, and some time after some poachers kill the mama elephant, the King hosts some sort of festival. Tony and dad take their father and son elephants to the show, and while Tony's distracted watching some martial arts dad gets shot and the father and son elephants are kidnapped. Tony finds out they were taken to Australia and goes after them. The rest of the film is him wandering around Sydney and fighting lots of bad guys.
The problem is the subplots. We get scenes showing the evil mafia guys about five times more than we need to, since we don't care. Some odd transvestite son is trying to take over the mafia organization, there are assassinations and poisonings and corrupt police and mistaken identities, and it just goes on and on in entirely unnecessary fashion.
It's basically an early Jackie Chan movie with delusions of grandeur. There's lots of action and some comedy and bad guys who must be brough to fist-based justice. Jackie even makes a cameo, when he and Tony Jaa bump into each other in the airport. But it's a Jackie Chan plot gone wrong, since we need just a little bit to establish the cartoony bad guys and set up the final confrontation when our hero tracks them down and takes vengeance. Instead we get numerous scenes of them doing stuff we don't care about. It's like the director saw
The Godfather too many times and wanted to make a real movie, with a heavy martial arts component. He should have stuck to the martial arts, since Tony is completely off the screen far too much of the time. True, Tony's acting skills seem to be inversely proportional to his martial arts talent, and any time he's on screen talking it's actively unpleasant, but the script did him no favors. A typical scene establishes some bad guy hang out, and then Tony runs in and starts shouting for his elephants, in Thai. "Where's Corn! Where's Corn! Bring me Corn!" he cries, over and over again. Corn is the name of his young elephant, you see, though I can't say why he expects any of the Australian bad guys to know that, when he busts in shouting in Thai.
His shouting works well enough though, since whenever he does it a bunch of bad guys run out to fight him and he beats them up in creative fashion, and then we get another scene with mafia guys talking, and then Tony comes in shouting, and so on. It's really about as bad a movie as it could possibly be, with such good martial arts.
Martial ArtsAnd the martial arts are great. I've linked in the past to various fight scenes online,
this one with lots of guys in black and arm breaks, and
this one vs. capoeria fighter Lateef Crowder, a guy with a broadsword, and a really huge steroid brute. (The water fight in the church is a good example of the insanity of the film's plot, since Tony and another guy are hiding in the church, and they say, "The police might check here. We should leave." The film cuts to them sitting parked in a field, and they say, "We should go back, something bad might have happened." and then they're back at the church, which is in flames and infested by evil martial arts guys. So then they leave again, after the fight scene.)
Those two action scenes hardly scratch the surface; the first one is just a small excerpts of the whole scene it takes place in, and there are several other fight scenes as long or longer than those, along with lots of short, intense fight scenes.
The best one in the movie is probably a fight in an underground club/casino, since it's done in one long steady cam shot. I'm talking long, like 4 or 5 minutes of unbroken footage, in which Tony fights a bunch of guys the lobby, then ascends a spiral staircase with stops on each landing to beat down more bad guys. They fight with weapons, furniture, fall over the side of the stairs, get kicked through walls and doors, and on and on, and all in one take. Tony must dispatch 50 guys in the scene, all without an edit or a cut. You can tell he's getting a little winded by the end, and it really reminded me of some of the extended sparring sessions we do in Kali class, against one or more people, where you have to pace yourself and use less-demanding moves when you get tired, save energy for flurries, etc. It's a marvelous shot though, and really illustrates the benefit of having an actual martial arts guy in your film, rather than just training Keanu Reeves or Matt Damon or whoever to fake it. When Tony and other martial artist/stuntmen are going at it, the camera can just show what they're doing from a distance -- everything doesn't have to be multiple camera angles and close ups and deceptive editing.
Overall, this film gets my highest recommendation if you enjoy fight scenes and martial arts. If you don't it's not something you'll enjoy sitting through, and in any event, you're probably better off buying or renting the DVD so you can fast forward through the crap and watch the good stuff over and over.
Labels: movie review, tony jaa
