Day 030 || Ong Bak 2: The Beginning

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning, 2008

Dir. Tony Jaa

There's no quote this time, because you'd be hard pressed to find anything worth repeating from the dialogue in this abortion of a film. And I don't use abortion strictly for shock factor, this film feels aborted and abandoned, but that is something I'll get to a little later on in the review.

Ong Bak 2 is the prequel/follow-up to the first Ong Bak, but as far as I can tell, there's no relation to the first film. Furthermore, there's not much of a coherency to the basic plot either. From what I gathered it's the story of a a young orphan (Tony Jaa) who is taken in by a group of outlaws after his royal family was killed before his eyes. Everything else that follows is your typical revenge flick...with the exception that typical implies some sense of normalcy.

Ong Bak 2 fails on most levels, and is surely a step backwards from it's predecessor in every conceivable way, with one exception. The cinematography is often times stunning, and often reaches beautiful. The color palettes used are very interesting and some shots are set up really well. And here's the but. Every time I was about to give credit to the cinematography, Jaa decides to set up a shot in slow motion. Slow mo shots aren't necessarily bad, as they can really emphasis key scenes are can be used to great effect to show how beautiful a shot really is. Well Jaa must have thought every other scene in this movie was the coolest thing ever, because close to every minute we're treated to another slow-mo shot. Not even necessarily one slowing down an action or fight scene.

And of the fight scenes, we're treated to three. One after he's joined the outlaws which has him fighting all the masters to prove his worth, which is pretty average, ending in a RIDICULOUS fight between him and a feral man, complete with the sound effects of a bear growling the entire time. Then later on we're treated to my personal favorite set piece in the film, which has Jaa fighting against a group of guys in Drunken Master style, which contains the quick pace and brutality that fans of his will love. And then towards the very end of the film we have a borderline exhaustive fight that goes on for about twenty minutes between Jaa and an entire army, it seems. And all of these fights don't come remotely close to anything we've seen in Ong Bak, The Protector, or even the recent Jaa imitation film, Chocolate. All of those have superior fight scenes, and all are better films. And for the record, I enjoyed all of them, just in case you might think I have something against the genre or Tony Jaa.

Altogether the fight scenes make up roughly half an hour, which leaves the other hour of the film filled with mindless and sappy melodrama, none of which is interesting or engaging in any single way. After the first 30 minutes of the film, it becomes a test of patience...it left me waiting for another fighting scene, and in all honesty, the end of the film. Which comes abruptly in the middle of the last fight in the film. It ends on a cliffhanger that doesn't leave the audience demanding the sequel, but instead imbues confusion and a cheapened feel.

To say I disliked Ong Bak 2 is an understatement. I loathed Ong Bak 2. For a film based around cool fighting set pieces, and taken only in the light, it's still an unoriginal failure. Worse, if it's taken for a film as a whole, it's easily one of the most pretentiously and shamelessly hollow excuse for ego-stroking I've seen. Tony Jaa is a great martial artist, no doubt, but a filmmaker he's not.

I'm placed in a lose-lose situation. If Ong Bak 3 does actually come out, I don't care anymore. The second one was so offensively boring and mindless, that it turned me off to the series for good. And if Ong Bak 3 doesn't come out, it makes Ong Bak 2 entirely worthless and needless, and all the more offensive. Ong Bak 2 is the worst of the worst, and in fact I would be remiss to even refer to this as a film, as that implies some sort of integrity and artist merit.

0 out of 5