by Ailran

Created on: March 08, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Thai films are not a big draw here, or in the Western world at all as far as I can tell. Tears of The Black Tiger', a psychedelic cowboy musical, was the first one to ever get a UK cinema release, though it was closely followed by the magnificent true sports story/comedy Iron Ladies', and both of these were released over here only 3-4 years ago.

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior' is being sold as the first Thai martial arts film to go worldwide and offers viewers a return to real martial arts fighting, as opposed to the wire-fu' (wire attached fighting) of the recent imports of Crouching Tiger', Hero' & House of Flying Daggers'.

In fact the ads proudly proclaim that there isn't any stunt doubles in the movie, every piece of action is real and that there is no CGI, what you see on screen is what the actors actually did in front of the camera.

Tony Jaa is a Muay Thai champion, better known as Thai boxing over here, and it shows. His acting is not that great but his fluidity, his economy of movement and his fighting ability makes all the claims of no artificial enhancements to the filming all the more believable, after all the cynics amongst us are always dubious about such claims are we not? Unfortunately his acting skills do make the non-action scenes he is in pretty awful but the director seems to realise this and keeps him out of a lot of what could laughably be called the plot' development scenes!

The festival of Ong-Bak is a once every 24 years celebration performed in the small village of Nong Pradu, Thailand. It is a ceremony completed by the villagers to guarantee the success of the village in the future and the time for the next festival is fast approaching when a minor gangster called Don steals the head of their Ong-Bak statue, a religious artefact not unlike a statue of Buddha.
Ting, soon to be ordained as a priest and a student of Muay Thai, volunteers to go to Bangkok and retrieve the head before the festival.

Arriving in Bangkok Ting finds George, a small time criminal (very, very, small time) and a fellow Nong Pradu villager, and his girlfriend, Muay Lek. He tries to enlist their help but instead finds himself embroiled in their own petty squabbles with some other gangsters.

Ting gets caught up in a fight club', due to George of course, and does find time to start investigating the missing head in amongst his other adventures.

That is pretty much the basics of the plot; there isn't much to it because the plot isn't what this is all about. Ong-Bak is all

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