Director: Prachya Pinkaew
Cast: Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, RZA, Jeeja Yanin, Marrese Crump
Plot: Kham's elephant has been abducted yet again, so he sets out to recover him and runs into a criminal planning a high profile assassination.
Review: I didn't watch the first Tom Yum Goong before this one, but I am well aware of Tony Jaa's brand of action thanks to the Ong Bak trilogy. Tony reteams with the director of the first Ong Bak for this film, and as far as I can tell, he's managed to recapture some, if not all of his previous on screen magic.
In Ong Bak, Tony's practical approach to action sequences made it appear more real and violent. Perhaps in acknowledging the huge challenge in recreating these at an older age, Tony and the filmmakers have resorted to CGI and some wirework to execute some sequences, including a bridge jump and a fight in a burning room. This kinda dilutes the awesomeness of what we're used to seeing from him, so the fights that don't use these effects are the ones that stand out. One such fight is between Tony and Marrese Crump, the antagonist's right hand man.
The acting here isn't excellent obviously, ranging from decent to downright awful (the guys playing the Interpol agents are horrible). Tony is good enough in his role as Kham, with frequent collaborator Petchtai Wongkamlao doing well as Mark the cop, who acts as sidekick cum funny guy. RZA hams it up as the main villain LC and even gets to beat up Tony at one point while poor Jeeja Yanin only gets to show off her martial arts moves and gets so few lines as Ping, a young girl seeking revenge on Crump. I think she deserved a bit more character development. Speaking of Tony getting beat up, that's another sign of him acknowledging his older age, as he gets hammered quite a fair bit here compared to his previous films.
The film suffers from a handful of lapses of logic, bad acting here and there and the unfortunate use of CGI. Director Prachya Pinkaew could have tightened up his film a bit in these aspects. Again, I felt that a more practical approach would have worked wonders here.
Action wise, TYG2 is quite good actually, but it is far from being at the level Tony Jaa was at once. (3/5)
2 comments:
This movies taking too fucking long to be available its getting irritating and im at the point of forgetting about it and moving on to other movies. This is what happens when you live in the stupid gay western side of the world, you get crap Action and martial arts movies from Hollywood and delayed releases of great eastern movies.
Such a long time to wait for its official release and now to wait for when its going to be available, probably by mid 2014 at this rate, thanks stupid western world, they're so misinformed and stupid here and ignorant. Give us shit action and martial arts movies and don't want to accept screenings of great eastern movies here. This side of the world sucks
Forget the movie reviews and what they say about the plot, plot this plot that. The fight scenes were creative and fresh, Ignore the cgi in the background and focus on the fights. This is a martial arts movie, story comes second in these type of movies. the fights were not bad at all as stupid reviewers said, they were choreographed well.
If you want a story, go watch some drama, or chick flick. If this movie focused too much on the plot we wouldn't have been delivered all this amazing action. The plot was kept simple, it wasn't a "Nothing-plot" it was kept simple with more focus on the martial arts.
Great movie, my rating - 5 out 5
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