Movies: Ong-Bak review

I went to see this movie today with a friend. I had heard that this movie had some great martial arts moves in it. Well, I was not disapointed! Wow, during the combat scenes, you can actually feel how painful it is to be at the recieving end of those punches and kicks. The movies style of filming enforces those punches and kicks.

Thai martial arts likes to hit the head often. I think they believe an unconcious enemy is as good as a dead one. But the moves are awesome to watch on the big screen. This guy can also jump, there is this scene where he is being chased and he keeps on jumping over a ton of things. Really amazing. But this movie is very violent, there are a lot of fight scenes and it's not the kind of scenes you would see Jackie Chan in. It's hard to explain, but this guy's move seem a lot more violent than Jackie's. It must be all the head hits and knee hits. I would not recommend this movie to little kids because of this.

The story is ok but not super great. I must admit I haven't seen many Thai movies (first one) but can imagine this is a good Thai movie (since it's in American theaters). But that doesn't mean anything, I've seen great movies which will probably never see the light of day here. One such great movie is a Korean comedy called "My Sassy Girl", if you can get your hand on it, watch it.

Back to Ong-Bak. I did enjoy myself but I was a bit disapointed in the story, but the martial arts is just amazing, a lot of never seen moves.

Verdict: B+