Digital Sextant

I will attack your elephant!

A student recommended this movie to me in an offhand way that made me think it was going to be delightfully awful. Instead, it was just delightful, with a touch of ludicrousness. The movie revolves around Tien, the son of a nobleman who fell on the wrong side of a political struggle. Tien gets captured by some slavers and, because of his spunky attitude toward the crocodile they try to feed him to, is rescued by the king of thieves, who proceeds to train him in the deadly arts. It turns out Tien is really good at the deadly arts.

As a plot, it’s a thin excuse to stage fight after fight after fight, in the Kung Fu movie style. There’s lots of quick punching and weird finger grabs, as well as amusing set pieces like an elephant. A few other thoughts:

• The ludicrous moments in the movie put the film much closer to something like Kung-Fu Hustle than a serious action movie like The House of Flying Daggers. While Ong Bak 2 does have some good acting (particularly on the part of Tien’s long-lost step sister), it isn’t a movie driven by emotion, but by fighting.
• My student confirms that the reason the film came up in the context of ‘bad’ movies was due to its godawful voice dubbing, which not only evinces a drought of vocabulary consistent with airport signage, but also features a voice cast straight from a cheap Eastern European P.C. game, circa 1998.
• The film doesn’t show any ambiguity about the fact that these thieves gleefully kill the people they rob from. Unlike Robin Hood movies, where they rob the wealthy and we don’t mind, Tien and his gang of thieves rob sad looking peasants floating through the bog, cutting these men down with little thought and no remorse. And unlike American movies where we can get behind anti-heroes who act this way (c.f. Payback or American Psycho), Tien appears pretty much straight up as a hero. It’s as if we fell on the side of the thieves in The Seven Samurai.
• My favorite moment in the film is when Tien proves himself brave by capturing the biggest elephant in an Eastern bronco-busting scene.  You should also keep an eye out for the scene when Tien stalks a royal dude who came after his family. Like Maximus in Gladiator, he performs before his enemy and has plenty of time to glower menacingly.
• Just a side note: if someone in elaborate garb–say a full body outfit with lots of decoration, an elaborate head-piece, and a mask–murdered my father, I’d probably remember that garb in detail. Then, if I saw that person wearing everything but the mask, I would probably recognize them as the assassin. Just sayin.’

Overall, I liked it. I guess I haven’t seen much Kung-Fu, so I’m perhaps out of my league here, but I was much more entertained and interested than I expected to be.