Thanks to the Category Leads for adding this for me

Released in 2003 to some variety of success in it's native Thailand, my interest was awoken to Ong Bak via the internet, where hype about this 'no strings or CG' martial arts extravaganda was running rampant. Intrigued, I purchased an import copy off Ebay, which duly arrived and proved faulty. The seller had no problems, and asked me to return it in exchange for another copy. Which never came. After an E-Mail and myself and the seller coming to the conclusion it disappeared over christmas, I finally got my hands on Ong Bak:Muay Thai Warrior yesterday, and duly took it in, in subtitled form, last night after my work.

Note that the subtitles on my copy weren't the best, and the character names may differ slightly to those you will find on other copies of the movie.

The movie follows young Ting(Phanom 'Tony Jaa' Yeerum - Tom Yum Goong), who lives in a remote village in Thailand, where he was abandonned as a child and raised by the monks in the teachings of Buddha, and in the lethal martial art of Muay Thai Kickboxing. The villagers worship a stone Buddha called the Ong Bak, and their second most hallowed item is a Buddha Amulet kept by the village elder.
When a crooked antiques dealer,Komtuan(Suchao Pongwilai - Angkor:Cambodia Express) sends one of his men, Don(Wannakit Sirioput - Belly of The Beast) to acquire the amulet and he cannot pry it from the village elders, that night he and his men cut off the head of the Ong Bak and take it back to Bangkok with them.

Ting volunteers to go to the city to retrieve the treasured item, and to find Hum Lae(Perttary Wongkamlao
- Killer Tattoo), the son of a villager. Hum Lae is in denial of his past, and he now makes a living as a con man with his schoolgirl sidekick Muay(Pumwaree Yodkamol - in her only role), and initially turns Ting away, until he sees he has a bag full of cash, which he steals and takes to a fight club to bet on a match.
Ting follows him, and accidentally ends up entering the fighting, where he KO's his foe with one kick. The two former villagemates must come to trust each other, and help each other regain the sacred Ong Bak, but not only will they have to go up against an army of goons, but also the deadly Burmese kickboxer Saming(Chatthapong Pantanaunkul - In his only role) is also on the side of the smugglers, and they may even have to cram in a few more fights at the club for money and honour to boot.

Now, as you may have guessed, the story to Ong Bak isn't exactly going to be winning any awards any time soon, but it does it's job, which is to hold all the set pieces of action together well enough, and while there isn't exactly a lot of deep character development going on, to be honest the majority of the action scenes just capture the viewer so much that multi-dimensional characters really aren't even called for, we have our heroes, and our villains, the stall is set out and it's just a case of them squaring off through various situations.

And action scenes there are aplenty, they probably take up about 85% of the total movie to be honest, and each one, if some are rather cliched, never fails to simply blow me away with the sheer entertainment factor of it. We have the chase through the asian street market, which has never looked better down to Jaa and his many ingenious ways to avoid and negotiate the obstacles, including cars, people's heads,barbed wire hoops and more, and the man's fight scenes are also wonderful in terms of pure primal brutality and realism.
Jaa makes much of the fact he doesn't use wires or CGI, and to be perfectly honest,quite rightly so. His many flips,twists and stunts look a hell of a lot better and more spectacular than the majority of the wirework rubbish being churned out. Jet Li wishes he could do this stuff. The fights, the blows, actually look like they hurt. No punches look pulled,and the movie is all the better for it. Several of Jaa's moves are shown in replays from different angles, just as if to get the point accross of how good his moves are. The action scenes in the movie are epic, just bloody well entertaining, and slicker,more powerful, and generally better than anything I've seen this side of 1990, hell possibly full stop.
The only real fault I have with the action scenes is that while Saming is played in a nice sneering manner, he doesn't quite match Ting in terms of fighting skills, or general athletic ability, and instead is a rather poor 'roid powered Muay Thai. Im willing to forgive this, because the pair's final fight is excellent to watch, but trying to find some sort of equal for Jaa will be the key to keeping his films up to scratch. Any martial arts movie is only as good as it's villain, and it's often the reason I find soft-spots for the films of Jean Claude Van Damme, because in some of his movies, the villains are spot on. But it's early days for Jaa yet, and he managed to make this brilliant to watch without any real foil.

I've stated on countless occasions that Im not keen on playing critic on actor's whom Im being interpreted to through subtitles or dubbing, and Ong Bak is an especially potent case of this, mainly due to the fact I don't trust the subtitles on my copy much, due to a good few spelling errors,words going missing(that were often easy to fill in) and even the occasional blatant mistake(in one scene, a character can blatantly heard shouting "f**k you!", yet the sub reads 'f*ggot'.
With that said, none of the performances were blatantly bad enough to shine through as negative, which is always a good sign.

The music in the film consisted of a semi-techno beat thing with some traditional oriental stuff stuck in for good measure, ok so we ain't talking anything to rush out and order OSTs of, but it suits the movie perfectly, which is the job they set out to do.

Ong Bak isn't any sort of milestone in cinema history, it doesn't come out with any great innovations or new techniques, Ong Bak just takes the forgotten genre of the one man army action movie, and breathes new life into it by producing some of the most spectacular and endearing action scenes I have ever seen in any movie, be it's origins in Japan,Hong Kong,America or anywhere else.

If you have any, even the most remote, love for the genre of the action film, you owe it to yourself, and the genre, to do everything in your power to see Ong Bak. The sad fact is that a lot of people won't, I just hope that some studio picks this up for a properly subtitled or dubbed western release, much like the ones that Hong Kong films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers have been getting of late. It may be a bit of a pipe dream, but to be perfectly honest, I would rather watch this than anything coming out of Hong Kong at the moment.
I've actually seen reviews that bicker more about what to call the star, Tony Jaa or Phanom Yeerum, he seems to prefer Jaa, and to be perfectly honest, if he continues to make movies as old fashioned good as this, I'll call him whatever the hell he likes. Hopefully this will lead to a vast career in action movies for the lad, hopefully all on this scale(he sets his trousers on fire for a sequence, and yes it's actually him), but even if this was to be his last ever movie, it's still a legacy to be proud of.
Ong Bak:Muay Thai Warrior is a movie that brought me hard-hitting entertainment of the sort I haven't had in a long time, and even though my import copy cost me quite a fair sum, if Premier Asia or some such company plans on bringing out any sort of deluxe edition in the UK, I'll gladly purchase it as well.

In short, if action movies even remotely float your boat, especially martial arts tinted ones, you want Ong Bak,while it may not really introduce much new to the genre to be written down, it certainly takes it up a notch, and is the action movie all others I see from now on will be compared to.

I feel I have to give this full marks.It's a rarity that any movie, let alone a modern one, can actually make me say "F*****g hell..." to myself at an action sequence, and Ong Bak manages it on several occasions.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening