The Protector - La legge del Muay Thai

The Jatalangkabaht people are proud villagers who live as one with the elephants. Kham and his father look after the mighty Por Yai and the baby Korn and, when they learn of a royal elephant inspection, decide to travel to the city to take part. However the two elephants are taken and Kham's father shot. One fight later, Kham learns that the elephants have been taken to Sydney, Australia. Kham travels to Australia to recover his elephants – a path that brings him into the lives of police officer Mark, call girl Pla and crime boss Madame Rose.

I'm not entirely sure why this flopped because, like Ong Bak, although everyone knows the plot and acting will generally be weak, few will be in the cinema for anything other than impressive action. Of course Warrior King delivers this but I was also reasonably impressed by how the other factors had improved to a certain degree. The narrative is still a weak excuse for lots of people to get kicked in the head and there are still lots of scenes that don't seem to make sense and, well, just happen. However the film does feel a little bit more professional; touches of humour such as the comment about pirate DVD's for example. Of course none of this means that the plot is any good but at least it is better than previous. Perhaps it is not PC to say it, but the use of English with Thai helps as well – I find the latter a very ugly language and the way it is scaled back does make it more accessible to a western audience.

The lack of a really engaging plot does rather mean that the action exists as a separate entity and is not part of a gripping total film – the temple fights being a good example as they are more like baddies in a video game than a film. Of course with action this good it doesn't really matter and you will still find yourself gasping at some of the violent kicks. Some of it is a little overdone (the rollerblading bit was all a bit daft) but some is surprisingly well done. There is a continuous tracking shot that moves up several floors and encompasses many individual fights that I thought was stunning and must have been so difficult to get right. Jaa's skills are undeniable and he is helped by the way his character is given more anger to work with and isn't a "naïve country boy" to the degree he was in Ong-bak. He still isn't a great actor but he is getting better at least in his native tongue. Wongkamlao has less to do here but his English is good and he comes off well. Khongmalai is a good addition as she is natural and very easy on the eye (although I did feel a bit cheapened by her gratuitous mud bath scene). Xing's Rose isn't great but De Montemas has a bit more menace (shame his character is so poor), while Nguyen is generally a good turn.

Overall then this is not a great film because of the weaknesses in the plotting and some reasonably average acting turns. However it is a marked improvement on Ong-bak in these areas and should be a bit more accessible as a result. The action suffers from being cut off from the narrative but is still very enjoyable for what it is. Fans of the genre should love it.

Ong Bak was a fantastic achievement by the young Thai fighter America has come to embrace as Tony Jaa. Fantastic stunts, amazing fight choreography, and an overwhelming sense of brutal martial arts action that has been missing in fight films since Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx. However, the overall success of Ong Bak was diminished by the lack of intriguing characters and a fluid story that actually made some sense. Tom Yum Goong starts off on the same foot, but then takes the viewer in an entirely different direction…an example of one of the most explosive and entertaining martial arts movies of ALL TIME.

To go into intricate detail about the plot outlines of TYG will do you no good, it will not make you want to see this movie. What makes me so passionate about Tony Jaa and his visual appeal is his overall dynamic nature in the fight scenes. As told in the plot outline, his elephants get stolen, and he must fight to get them back…and fighting is what he does like no one else I have ever seen. It doesn't matter how many opponents appear before Tony, he takes them all in stride, and excels in dramatic fashion, either by his flying acrobatic kicks or his powerful breathtaking punches. But what truly makes this film unique is Tony's ability to embrace a new type of Muay Thai made especially for the movie: Muay Kotchasan.

Although this may not make much sense to you or interest you, trust me, when you view this film and see Muay Kotchasan put into action, you will witness something never before seen on film. Tony's moves are so brutal at times, you can't help but grimace and wonder how the stunt men could take such punishment. He breaks elbows, rips quadriceps, destroys ligaments, cracks vertebra…I could go on, but the movie pretty much speaks for itself. But, if I had to choose the most exciting part of TYG, it has to be Tony's second bout with Nathan Jones. Learning from his mistakes in the first fight, Tony's adapts his fighting style to his smaller frame, and uses Nathan's size against him in a chilling display of David vs. Goliath…it is quite a sight to behold.

Overall, Tom Yum Goong is an awesome spectacle of Tony Jaa's fighting ability, and if you truly enjoyed Ong Bak, then be ready to be blown away by something far better.

The makers of 2003's Ong-Bak are back with bang, a crash, a couple of elephants and many, many cracks. In fact, every other word spoken appears to be "Argh!". Muay Thay expert-extraordinaire Tony Jaa returns to lead us once again, as his sacred elephants are poached from Thailand and sent to, of all places, Australia. As our hero Kham, he must travel there himself to basically kick the living snot out of anyone who steps in his way. And that's about it.

The maker of this film, Prachya Pinkaew, is either a really shoddy storyteller, or has clocked on to the fact that no one goes to see martial arts films for the plot. Warrior King has an almost identical structure to his first film Ong Bak: a good 25 minutes or so of religious Thai imagery, villagers roaming around with animals before someone comes along and messes everything up. Petchtai Wongkamlao essentially reprises the comedy role he played in the previous release, although this time he hogs all the comic moments, as the wafer-thin script offers little in compensation for its action scenes. All the English-spoken acting is terrible. With that said I'm assuming most of the foreign language acting is terrible too, but for obvious reasons the Australian acting stood out more. The script is full of age old Hollywood clichés such as cops being taken off the case, only to go vigilante, gold-hearted prostitutes and a whole host of colourful looking gangsters (former WWE reject Nathan Jones makes a hilarious cameo) that wouldn't look out of place in a straight-to-video Steven Seagal flick.

And yet despite the glaring faults with a film as silly as this, none of the criticisms truly matter for one simple reason: Tony Jaa is absolutely amazing. Watching our protagonist fly kick the hell out of everyone before performing all sorts of acrobatic stunts will have your jaw on the floor. The man can obviously smash through thin plot points as fast as he can human bones. The film isn't badly shot either. Apart from getting a nice sense of Thai culture and a splendid view of Sidney, Warrior King is expertly choreographed. There is one remarkable sequence in which our protagonist battles his way through four stories of the same building absolutely smashing the hell out of anything thing that moves, which seems to go on forever, taken all in one single steady-cam shot. It would make David Lean jealous.

Granted if you've seen Ong Bak watching Muay Thay for a second time won't have the same head-crushing impact. Whilst Warrior King boasts plenty of superbly choreographed action sequences, it doesn't peak as well as the much more pure Ong Bak managed to. The movie does, however, generate a sense of darkness amidst the stalking threat of campy buffoonery. So it's an impressive sophomore effort, obviously catering more towards an ever increasingly cognizant western audience.

Had the opportunity to watch Tom Yum Goong at a local cinema here in Bangkok on opening night. Expectations were high, and the movie fulfilled them in both good and bad.

The action was some of the best caught on film (do they still use film?) that I have ever seen. Panom "Ja" Yeerum again showed that with his background of Muay Thai, gymnastics and stuntman work, he can deliver action scenes that are graceful and brutal at the same time, and will have the audience picking up their jaws from the floor at times. They don't use gimmicks like strings or special FX, so everything you see him do is stuff he really does. Except maybe one flying knee where he literally flew about 5 meters into the guy so he must have been launched off something.

However, as good as the action was, the obvious comparison would be to Ong Bak (same lead, same director). And as amazing as TYG's action scenes were, they didn't have the raw power that Ong Bak delivered. I think this may be because of different stuntmen - in Ong Bak, a lot of the people that got beaten up were probably amateur Thai stuntmen or retired muay thai dudes (scene in cave, for example) who don't mind taking a very heavy kick or punch to make a few Baht and be in a movie. So the impacts were very hard and very real in Ong Bak, and it made the action that much more "in-your-face". In TYG, due to the action taking place in Australia and the higher production values, the stuntmen didn't seem to get beaten up as badly. Sure, it was still better than any other action movie besides Ong Bak, but not quite as raw and powerful.

Then... the plot. The plot has already been criticized by many, and obviously it is full of holes, unintentional humor (unless there really is an English-language news channel in Australia where the newscaster has a strong Thai accent?) and so on. But it was nowhere near as bad as Ong Bak. Ong Bak really is a "fast forward to the action scenes" type of movie, whereas Tom Yum Goong is a watchable movie in its entirety. The first 15 minutes have barely any action at all, but the elephant scenes and the beauty of rural Thailand were beautifully shot and the actors did a surprisingly good job - both Panom and the guy who played his father. It seems that Panom's acting classes have paid off. Now if only he can learn passable English, he'll really have a chance of becoming the next big thing in Martial Arts action movies.

The (intentional) comic relief was much better than in Ong Bak - Mum Jok Mok plays a Thai policeman in Sydney. How he got to be Sergeant there, we'll never know, but he has a few funny lines - most of which are much funnier to Thais or people who know Thai culture than to the international audience. Like the ".... oh, oh, oh - and Laos!" line. More laughs came from cameos like the Jackie Chan lookalike at the airport and Sek Loso drinking M150 on the street in Sydney. Not so much product placement as an inside joke ("go inter") for the Thai audience.

Getting the audience to cheer for the hero in an action movie obviously requires a nasty villain or a group of villains. Tom Yum Goong does well in this regard as well - both the Thai mobsters and especially their bosses in the Asian mafia in Sydney are an interesting, suitably detestable bunch. Also their "bodyguards", from the Capoeira guy to the three huge Caucasians in the end, are very good opponents for Panom "Ja" to beat up on. Furthermore, having the motivator be elephants (respected animals, and to Kham, family members) instead of a stolen head of a Buddha statue (like in Ong Bak) works much better, especially for non-Thai audiences. Good acting by the baby elephant in one early scene in the movie, by the way! Deserving of an Animal Oscar.

To sum up, Tom Yum Goong has a decent plot, a good cast with better acting than was to be expected, good cinematography, and of course, plenty of cracking, beautifully choreographed action that will not fail to impress any Martial Arts action movie enthusiast.

Highlights: Kham learning how to fight the Capoeira guy in a very well choreographed scene, and the bone-crunching extravaganza that was like Kill Bill Vol. 1's restaurant scene without the swords.

An excellent achievement in its genre. A whole lot of fun. 9/10.

In Bangkok, the young Kham (Tony Jaa) was raised by his father in the jungle with elephants as members of their family. When his old elephant and the baby Kern are stolen by criminals, Kham finds that the animals were sent to Sidney. He travels to Australia, where he locates the baby elephant in a restaurant owned by the evil Madame Rose (Xing Jing), the leader of an international Thai mafia. With the support of the efficient Thai sergeant Mark (Petchtai Wongkamlao), who was involved in a conspiracy, Kham fights to rescue the animal from the mobsters.

"Tom Yum Goong" has a silly, flawed and absurd story, where gangsters do not use guns, but sticks, clubs, rollers, bicycles, motorcycles or whips. Further, they just fight in sequence against the hero, one by one, to have their arms and legs broken. The criminal Johnny simply vanishes without any further explanation. However, the choreography of the fights is amazing and very realistic, making this movie a worthwhile entertainment. Tony Jaa is probably the successor of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and I believe this movie could be less "serious" and have more humor like in Jackie Chan's films. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Protetor" ("The Protector")