Apart from getting a nice sense of Thai culture and a splendid view of Sidney, Warrior King is expertly choreographed. The man can obviously smash through thin plot points as fast as he can human bones. Watching our protagonist fly kick the hell out of everyone before performing all sorts of acrobatic stunts will have your jaw on the floor. 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. 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. 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. All the English-spoken acting is terrible. 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. 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. 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. As our hero Kham, he must travel there himself to basically kick the living snot out of anyone who steps in his way. 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. In fact, every other word spoken appears to be "Argh!". The makers of 2003's Ong-Bak are back with bang, a crash, a couple of elephants and many, many cracks.
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March 2023
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