Ong Bak: The Beginning

Tony Jaa is back, and this time you can watch him on the big screen in the UK! Ong Bak: The Beginning is the prequel to the original Ong Bak but aside from the fact that it centres around martial combat it vastly different.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: a young boy sees his parents killed and is spirited away to safety, being raised by a band of renegades. He develops impressive weaponry and fighting skills, then goes to seek revenge for his parents’ deaths.

As well as starring in this film, Jaa also wrote, directed and produced it as well as choreographing all the stunt scenes. This shows in the attention to detail and brutality. However, there the similarity ends between the earlier Ong Bak movie and the last film he did, Tom Yum Goong.

While they were both given a contemporary setting, this third outing for Jaa is set back in the early days of Thailand when most people lived in jungles and territory was fought over by several self-styled “kings”. As such it’s all straw huts, mud and rain rather than skyscrapers and motorways.

The comedy element present in both previous films has also all but vanished. The fight scenes are far more brutal and hard-hitting (in more ways than one) with CGI blood splashes emphasising knife strokes and the like. We’re verging more into Bruce Lee territory than Police Story era Jackie Chan that we’re used to from Jaa.

This has its good sides and down sides. The film isn’t what some people would be expecting, but on the other hand it might surprise a few people who’ve not bothered with the likes of Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger due to its more folk-tale storyline.

With the way the story flows – or rather doesn’t as it jumps back and forth in time – it can be a little hard to follow at times. However, once the backstory kicks in, you do get more of a feel for the character. The “twist” ending has been done a million times before in Hollywood, but the action sequences are simply superb. And very brutal.

Lots of bass-heavy thuds as torsos are pummelled and crunching sounds when arms are twisted. It’s not “gross” in its depiction of violence – certainly not compared to the likes of The Punisher – but you can almost feel each punch landing when the speakers in the cinema sound with the report.

There are a couple of fantasy elements with some very bizarre female (I think) combatants who seem to be half-animal. This really steps the film apart from its forebear which was definitely more real-world. If you can class two dozen tuk-tuks falling off a half-completed highway as “real-world”.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I did prefer the first film, mainly due to the humour, but there’s no denying that this is a great piece of martial arts movie-making. Apparently there’s a third Ong Bak due out which will somehow tie the first two together. I think I can see where they’re going after the speech at the end of this one, but I guess we’ll see.

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