Ong Bak 2: The Beginning Review
If the balletic and elegant fighting styles of Jackie Chan and Jet Li are the tap and swing of the martial arts world, then Tony Jaa and his Thai cohorts are practicing the Lambada. Jaa, who rose to international popularity in 2005 with Ong Bak, introduced the mainstream to the brutal and direct art of Muy Thai. Utilizing a mixture of feet, elbows and knees—and your head if you can figure a way to fit it in—Muy Thai is Jaa’s signature style. The two come in a package, and after a few other forays into the genre, they are both back with Ong Bak 2. The new entry ups the ante of the original by including more stunts, more enemies and a bigger budget which results in some of the most exciting fight scenes ever put to film.
Jaa, who does all of his own stunts, allegedly without the use of wires or fx, is a skilled and agile performer. In the first Ong Bak he bore more than a little resemblance to the late Bruce Lee, playing a strong, silent warrior who was fighting to regain a relic stolen from his village. With lithe movements and an air of self-possessed stoicism, Jaa rocked the midnight movie festival circuit with some dangerously crazy battle antics.
In making Ong Bak 2, he adopted directing duties and strange reports from the set suggested that the actor cracked under the stress and started hiding out in a cave. It really doesn’t matter; what happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. What does matter is that Jaa came out of his self-imposed exile and finished the movie. On a purely visceral level, this new chapter, taking place close to 600 years prior to the original, outshines its predecessor for visual majesty and sensational action.
Narratively, the film is a giant mess. Less structured than Jaa’s previous films, it tells the story of a young orphan named Tieng who is taken in by a band of river pirates when his family is murdered by an usurper to the throne. After a particularly harrowing scene involving adolescent Tieng and a hungry crocodile, the pirates adopt him as their own and raise him in the culture and martial training of their kind. He becomes a mighty warrior, in tune with the natural world and the brigand underbelly of society. When he meets the woman he loved as a child, she is in the harem of the man who killed his father, and he sets out on a mission of revenge.
The whole thing plays like a silent melodrama, using the wafer-thin ‘story’ to advance Tieng along in his quest and prompt more butt-kicking. It would work better if Jaa didn’t have such delusions of grandeur. The original told a simple tale and it was more satisfying as a result. Here, Tieng is set-up as an antihero, but there is so little definition to his character that it feels awkward. Ong Bak 2 wastes considerable screen time relating Tieng’s back story with his parents and explaining the bond he shares with his love. When the movie ends abruptly, in a most inopportune spot, it feels like the production simply ran out of money. Jaa wants to make something more mythic, thoughtful and complex, but he doesn’t quite have the means yet as an author or a director to make it work as it should.
What he does get right are the action sequences and the film’s substantial and lush visual scenery. The first movie looked like it was shot in back alleys and seedy clubs, while the dense, shadowy jungles and foreboding ruins of ancient Thailand in the sequel look like they have been stripped from an Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novel. Speaking of Tarzan, Tieng appears to be a fan. In the movie’s most jaw-dropping sequence we see Tieng running across the tops of an elephant herd and when he forces the leader into submission, we see him standing triumphantly over the rest of the bowing pachyderms. In addition to Muy Thai, Jaa is also a trained Khon mask dancer (similar in basic concept to Japanese kabuki) and he finds the time to stage a particularly lyrical production in the palace of his nemesis.
The fight scenes are terrific and contain contortions of the human body during combat that I didn’t think were possible. There is an uninterrupted 20-minute battle with numerous foes at the climax as Jaa uses a sword to fend off his attackers. The choreography in this sequence is beyond belief, and he makes it look like second nature. What I admire about Jaa as an entertainer is his willingness to keep building up a scene long after it has wowed or thrilled the audience. It may take a little while for Ong Bak 2 to get going, but once it does, look out.
