Muddled and visceral: classic martial arts filmmaking.

Star/director Tony Jaa and co-director Panna Rittikrai’s follow up to the first international Thai blockbuster Ong Bak is, in many ways good and bad, a classic true-to-genre martial arts flick. The story is convoluted and clichéd. There are storytelling elements that feel like their inclusion is to satisfy a functionary’s need to check boxes on a list rather than to tell a story – hero’s childhood friend is still alive and in the service of the bad guy, check – and there are double-crosses and hidden identities that exist for no other logical reason than to provide a hoped-for boost of vengeful je ne sais quoi to a flagging later scene. It’s also filled with some of the best fight scenes of all time. So it has that going for it.

Ong Bak 2 is, obviously, ostensibly a sequel to Jaa’s breakout original hit and he has claimed that the slight problem that they seemingly have absolutely nothing to do with each other (the sequel is set 600 years before the first) will be resolved in an upcoming third film that will connect them. While the first was set in modern day, the sequel/prequel tells the story of Tien, the son of murdered nobility caught in a power struggle in feudal Thailand. Sent to live at a dancing school, he is tossed into the wild and must escape slave traders to finally live and train with a group of martial-arts-expert bandits, who teach him how to fight.

Tien is a brooding, emotional hero, tortured (I think, there is some disagreement about this) by the choices he has had to make to survive. We’d know more if the film told us more. This is the first action film I’ve ever seen, I think, that made me want more exposition. Jaa’s character, the troubled hero, has three or four lines of dialogue in the film, and not much more. There is a scene in the middle of the film that is such an abrupt leap in narrative pacing and structure that I legitimately I think thought that the projectionist, if this is even possible anymore, may have skipped a reel. Of course, that type of narrative obscurity and playfulness is fine and can be rewarding, even in a beat-em-up, but the weight of the narrative itself must support the filmmakers’ desire to screw with their audience’s expectations. Otherwise, the film just seems muddled and confusing, which was my experience. But the fights, are the star of the film, its raison d'être, and they’re spectacular, creative and brutally visceral, and easily enough to make the film worth seeing for fight fans despite its narrative flaws. 6.5/10

www.thesubstream.com/article-midnight-madness-review-10-ong-bak-2.html