Tony Jaa is unqestionably a martial artist with incredible and impressive skills, he already showed that to the world with Ong Bak.
However, many compared him to a whole bunch of martial art cinema stars in order to establish him as the "New Dragon from Asia" as some said.
And even is a bit too early to "balance the books", we can nonetheless try to develop a bit more.
- So New Bruce Lee ? No, not at all, the unmatched charisma of the "little dragon" (and his unmatched ego, some could say) and the place he took in history of cinema stop any comparison.
- New Jackie Chan ? In a matter of style maybe, although this particular style only fits to the 80's Jackie, not today's. Besides, the natural commic and the carreer choices of "become the dragon" make his journey matchless.
- New Jet Li Lian-Jie ? Maybe, if someday Tony Jaa winds up meeting some directors not necessarily more talented (after all, how much craps did Jet came up with...) but more caring for the quality of their works (I don't mean artistically, neither Tony's movies neither most of Jet's can be exactly called art works but true handcrafted pieces of work) rather than of the general trendiness of their movies.
Indeed, old school HK movies scripts weren't exactly masterpieces of writing neither, but I find that the falsely hip side, using cliche after cliche, in order to ease an exportation a bit too brutal and sudden, tend to ruin what's left between fights, which here, wasn't much anyway...
You just swop the Buddha's head for a pair of elephants, swop Bangkok for Sidney, and the rest is the same, Tony Jaa in his innocent and naive peasant-hero role, the "big city" still infested with scumbags all willing to share Tony's head, well, the usual routine in a few words... By the way, even if it's true that there's a lot of asian immigrant in Australia, the movie shows a real "thailanded" Sidney from mobsters to cops and journalists...convenient but not quite realistic (like it often happens in HK movies too...everyone seems to speak cantonese...).
Fight and action sequences are however truly excellent, especially fights opposing muay thai to an other martial art or fight sport (capoeira, wushu, ultimate fighting-like, vietvodao, etc...).
Nathan "Beast" Jones, Johnny Nguyen and the others are thus almost as deserving as Tony Jaa himself.
Anyway, fights are all "heavy" and punchy (who said violent ?) and just like for Ong Bak or an UFC, some will, by compassion, let go an "Ouch !" every ten seconds (particularly during the scene where Tony Jaa takes some fun breaking arms after legs and totalizes about 40 joints dislocated at the end of the scene) and some won't be able to prevent themselves from taking the whole thing humorously and laughing ay this spiral of useless violence rather than feeling it vicariously.
The film will however please animal protection upholders as well as tireless Tony Jaa fans along with one-take shots afficionados (nice 4 minutes long shot, in a Beat'Em All video game style).
In Brief, if you want to watch a movie with a bunch of dudes one night while chating, interrupting each other only when fights start, then watch Tom Yum Goong, action and fights are on top, no worry about that. However, for those who don't appreciate a fight or action movie without a real constructed background, for those more generally allergic to brain dead punchy movies or who prize their neurons...keep away from it...
