First Action Hero
Bangkok's street stalls bulge with martial-arts video imports from Hong Kong. Their influence is so pervasive that combat scenes in Thai films often replicate these cine-friendly twirly, “chop-socky” stylings. This is peculiar when you consider Thailand's uniquely vicious brand of kickboxing but, when you disregard white Westerner-fronted Hollywood pap like Kickboxer, Thai boxing is underrepresented on the silver screen. Pracha Pinkaew decided to even the balance with this home-spun movie reclaiming the purist's version of muaythai as a valid martial art. -- Published by MovieSeer.com, 2003
This is Pracha's first directorial effort in eight years (Ong Bak been in the making for four). He was stirred from his usual producer's role when 27-year-old Phanom Yeerum, who has adopted the acting name “Tony Ja”, pitched an idea for a script to Pracha's production company.
Inspired as a child by Jackie Chan's death-defying antics, Phanom could be found somersaulting haystacks and vaulting canals in the Isaan rice fields of northern Thailand. After enrolling as a gymnastics student, he underwent years of martial arts training, eventually landing stunt-double duties in Mortal Combat: Annihilation.
The visual appeal of martial arts stems from its triumph of form over function. Would kung fu really work best in a street fight? It can't be a coincidence that ju-jitsu practitioners usually win the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but most other martial arts, nay things in life, are more cinematically desirable than extended exhibitions of sweaty man-grappling.
Martial arts celebrate elaborate skill, a showcase carnival of superior aesthetics. An exception is muaythai, which in its gritty modern form is direct and brutal; evolved to emphasize clinical efficiency and economy of movement far from the twirling forms favoured by Hong Kong and Hollywood. So Phanom traced the roots of muaythai in order to represent its more elegant traditional manifestation, muayboran, dusting off around 100 old moves, with the result that most Thai viewers of the Ong Bak trailer reportedly thought they were watching kung fu.
The plots of martial arts movies are usually little more than clotheslines for the fighting, and Ong Bak abides by this formula. Urbanite thieves steal the head of a revered Buddha image from an upcountry village temple scheduled to host a mass ordination ceremony. It becomes the task of villager Boonting (Phanom) to track the thief down and reclaim the religious treasure.
Once in Bangkok, Ting inadvertently gets involved in unlicensed fighting organized by the thieves in a warehouse in a dingy alleyway off Khaosarn 
Road. These illegal gatherings provide ample opportunity for Phanon to show off his skills; and the action is often uncomfortably realistic as he metes out fierce punishment to a bunch of unseemly foreigners.
But the rising Thai action star shines brightest when called upon to perform his repertoire of audacious stunts, ranging from jumping though coils of barbed wire and sliding under moving trucks to somersaulting over vats of boiling oil. Pracha shoots the action with a wide-angle lens, and the hair-raising aerobatics are treated to multi-angle slow-motion replays as if part of a sports broadcast – an annoying device, but here justified by the outrageous nature of the tricks, which are unaided by CGI or wires.
Phanom isn't called upon to act much – he lacks Jackie Chan's baby-faced capacity for knockabout choreography (he's more like Jet Li, I think) – and his earnest country bumpkin character takes a back seat when it comes to the dialogue. The resulting narrative gap is filled by devious George (comedian Mum Jok Mok, in a colourful performance), the crude con-artist son of the village headman. Additional support comes from Suchao Piongwilai's mafia kingpin, who memorably gurgles his threats through a Stephen Hawking-style voice-box.
Playing out like a big-budget B-movie, with some truly nasty exploitation elements, including an enforced cocaine overdose, Ong Bak has been pounded into a competent action flick by its vicious fight scenes and standout stunt work. The movie stays true to its roots, toasting a simple message of honour and loyalty. A genre retread then, but with an added pinch of Thai spice to enliven the palette of kung-fu cinema.