Deu suay doo

Movie as such is pretty simple and straight forward with a twist in between which actually jinxed me. However, saying that, the only reason I watched it was JeeJa Yanin and her martial arts skills.

I was browsing through action videos in youtube and came across this movie's last action sequence which kind of so much impressed me that I was curious to watch the full movie. It went smooth and I wasn't expecting much too. But, by God, this lady had some skills and showed perfectly in martial arts. I remember watching Tom Yoom Gung earlier of Tony Jaa and that action star is the only other Thai actor which impressed me with his techniques. Bravo. JeeJa Yanin, in the same way, performed her own style and who knows, it could be taken as a reference in other action movies. Am now eager to watch her movie Chocolate. Fingers crossed.

This is the second film of the supremely talented JeeJa Yanin, who starred in Chocolate a couple years back. Chocolate was like a trumpet blast followed by the announcement: "We now present to you the next great martial arts star, JeeJa Yanin!" Raging Phoenix is a perfect follow-up. Yanin plays a punk band drummer who is kidnapped by a ring of white slavers. A group of young men who have had women in their life harmed by these people save Yanin and train her in the martial art of Thai drunken boxing. Like most martial arts movies, the plot is pretty negligible. It's actually kind of weird, because it begins as the same kind of gritty realism of Chocolate but eventually veers into a more fantastical landscape where the villains are abducting women to extract their tears, which they make into a perfume that drives men crazy. Or some such nonsense. Who cares? The bottom line is that Yanin kicks every ass that anyone chooses to hand to her. And she's super freakin' cute while doing it. I'd probably rank it below Chocolate, but I'd say it's about at the same level. If you liked that film, this is a no-brainer.

RAGING PHOENIX, a high-kicking Thai martial arts film, marks Jeeja Yanin's follow-up to her outstanding debut, CHOCOLATE. While proving to be a mildly entertaining movie with some great fight action to recommend it, it's an inevitable disappointment to those of us weaned on the likes of ONG BAK and WARRIOR KING, as it just doesn't hold a torch to the calibre of those two movies – or, indeed, Yanin's aforementioned debut.

The problem with this movie is pretty much everything aside from the action: the characters are cardboard-thin, the plot is shallow and the script is completely stupid. By the time we're introduced to the storyline of the villains harvesting the tears of their victims, you'll be rolling your eyes and saying "oh please". In addition, the acting is strictly drama school, and that includes Yanin; none of these guys would make it in a film requiring real performances.

Good news, then, is that the action is what this film is all about, and it lifts what could have been a debacle into something pretty entertaining; no WARRIOR KING, certainly, but something to be enjoyed at least once. The dance-infused combat sees Janin and her anarchist rebel friends battling a series of nefarious villains, and it inevitably builds up into a massive battle in the bad guys' lair (a ridiculous CGI underground chamber).

At the end, Yanin finally meets her match – a hulking Amazonian fighter by the name of Roongtawan Jindasing, a real-life bodybuilder and judo expert. The resultant fight takes in multiple locations, some exquisite camera (the bridge scene in particular) and goes on for about half an hour without ever getting dull; seasoned action director Panna Rittikrai ensures he gets the maximum mayhem for his money.

OK i have to admit i am generous when i give an 8, because i was to other movies as well a couple years ago. I know when i watch a martial arts movie to not look too much at the story, more on the fights. But since i started to go back on martial arts around 2 years ago and started my collection(which is now over 300 movies) i find the same problem going on with every THAI martial arts movie. To the Tony Jaa's to the unknown's. The fights are always very impressive, but the story is always CRAP !!! This movie is no exception. Some could say the initial synopsis is not that bad, gang abducting womens and heroes going after them. But where TAKEN(with Liam Neeson) succeeded in that department, this movie does not, going from one weird thing to the other and so on. The heroine training is pretty good and the initial plot seem pretty find, its later it become like "whatever". At least the fight are VERY impressive and well choreographed so you never get bored and always stay in the movie. But i would wish sometimes the Thais would learned that a good yet simple plot of a movie is the best way to showcase awesome martial arts. You don't need fancy stuff, you don't need weird stuff, you don't need stuff the audience would be like "huh....ok" . With Thais movie, its always the same thing, either a relic has been stolen and the hero goes after it, or its supernatural stuff. I don't know, maybe they should check the simple, yet effective formula of the US movies of the 90s. Hero got his ass kick, go back and train to a master, come back and kick the ass of the bad guy. I don't know... sometimes in martial arts the simpler plots work best, if you have good fighting to display and i can assure you this movie has.... Please people from thailand... leave the supernatural out of the martial arts movie... we don't wanna a cross over between star wars and bloodsport... we want just good ol martial arts.

Fans of martial arts action films in this region would find reason to celebrate recently with the introduction of Iko Uwais showcasing some combat Silat in Merantau and while I had counted him in amongst peers such as Tony Jaa, Jija Yanin stands out for being the only female of the lot who can dish out as much punishment as she could receive, and breakthrough performances aside, I think the real test comes in the follow up film, if it's either more of the same, or if it'll have enough bandwidth to allow the martial artist to go some distance from their maiden performance.

And I had enjoyed Raging Phoenix a lot more than Chocolate, which I felt had plenty of room in which to improve upon, especially in the editing department which didn't quite do that film justice in having Jija's character seem to go through each fight sequence like a video game, beginning each scene with the on-guard position. However, that film allowed her to showcase a whole range of moves and weapons, and in this one, her character sticks to one, which is a Chinese drunken fist equivalent, where the pupil downs gallons of alcohol, and through that intoxicated state, learn to internalize the alcohol and purge that high energy into something more hard hitting, channeling that deep down hurt and heartfelt pain they have to intrinsically possess into power through the knuckles.

The form of the martial arts clearly has plenty of Muay Thai in it, with the usual exploitation of elbows and knees to inflict maximum damage, though this time round the choreographers smartly fused some hip-hop break dancing moves into the martial arts, since those dance movies would already prep you that those spins and turns, and feigns with the feet, could actually translate to deadly assault steps to incapacitate any enemy. Yes you read me right, but it didn't turn out as bad as it sounded, and soon enough you just won't feel that it's an amalgamation of two different forms, at least not when the catchy Thai hip hop song Yong- Wai stops playing.

As the story goes (yes, you still need one), it was a wee bit different from the usual to say the least, though the inevitable melodramatic moments did prolong the runtime without welcome. The narrative for Raging Phoenix played out just like its title, where it starts off really slowly and in some ways quite the bore, before its form got junked and transformed, into something more engaging as the story progressed, right after Jija's Deu gets saved from the clutches of the evil Jaguar Gang, whose mission statement is to kidnap girls with unique pheromones. Cue obligatory training montage as she becomes the protégé of Sanim (Kazu Patrick Tang), Dog, Pig and Bull, and convoluted initiation rites later, she gets accepted into the vigilante group, seeking out the Jaguars to exact their individual vendettas.

Ranging Phoenix didn't turn out to be a one-woman show, which meant Jija had to step aside to allow her co-stars to shine, especially since her character is the rookie in this form of martial arts, and have to rely on the others to save her hide at first. It was a little painful to watch since we all know that this girl can really kick butt, though it made it all the more sweeter when she finally does. What she cannot do though, despite her new hairdo and cute- as-a-button features, is to play that romantic role given that there's a subplot involving unrequited love with her trainer Sanim, which was somewhat essential to fuel that new found strength (from depression actually) in the finale.

​A Thai film would seem incomplete without the obligatory evil transsexual, and Raging had one featured early for some comic relief. The chief villain, played by Roongtawan Jindasing, a body building champion, cuts a figure quite similar to Grace Jones's May Day in A View to a Kill, matching our heroine strength for strength, though triumphing with her D-cups, which I thought in a battle sequence she had used to knock Deu off her feet. Fight sequences had resorted to MTV-styled quick cut editing, though it did pace itself nicely through some slow- motion when required to allow the audience to take it all in. Fights were also nicely framed, especially when killer moves get employed, or when director Rashane Limtrakul decides to want to show you just how close and realistic the actors and stunt crew can get when they pull off hard hitting, bone-crunching action.

I would have thought that the film would have featured some outtakes – you know, for the filmmakers to show off that "real fights, real injuries" tagline, but to my surprise there was absolutely none. I would have loved to see whether some suspicion in the use of wire-work could be proved through the outtakes, since there were definitely some moves which were too hard to believe they can be executed without employing one. Padding also was visible though, for safety's sake of course, but don't let that distract you as much as it did to me.

Raging Phoenix isn't perfect, but it is yet another milestone for Jija Yanin to prove what she can do. Call me a fan as I am liking her films already, and can't wait to see her in more action films!