Reviewed by Tim Wong

VIEWING Prachya Pinkaew's Thai sensation Ong-Bak, one gets to witness a number of things: incredible feats of power and athleticism; shinbones made of Titanium; the laws of physics as Einstein knew them, defied. Now, if you're the kind of moviegoer I think you are, then this is the least you'd expect from the martial arts genre – the ability to levitate or somersault prodigiously now a wall-to-wall Post-it note on the public's mass consciousness.


"Wire-fu", as it's sometimes known, is far from a recent breakthrough – it's been in use since the 60's, at least – but when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon scuttled its way into subtitled history in 2000, the fly-by-wire variety became a mainstream sensation overnight. Trends, of course, belong in cycles, which makes Ong-Bak that much more pertinent right now. Closing the dog-eared book on romance with airpoints, this is a film that took one hard look at the pantheon of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, and said: "screw you, we don't need no Yuen Woo-ping puppetry, no digital embellishments, and no stinkin' costumes."

And Ong-Bak is more than just an anti-wuxia film. It's sweaty, untidy and rough around the edges; like a Straight Guy in the crosshairs of a Queer Eye, it subscribes to none of the grooming or accessorising that Men are supposed to care about these days. Oh no, Ong-Bak is a hetero-macho film: an unshaven, monosyllabic, beer-and-pizza guzzling grunt-fest, designed if anything to restore order to the emasculated state of martial arts cinema. If the finely woven gowns and bright primary colours of Hero and House of Flying Daggers were last year's style guide, then this season, consider the dirty denim and humid urban squalor of Ong-Bak the new black.

Or should I say Tony Jaa is the new black. Strip back the greasy agro-drapery, and you'll find a film primed in an undercoat of this ripped, slightly diminutive stuntman-turned-action star who possesses such outside-underpants-wearing ability, that it's actually been questioned why he didn't compete in the high jump for Thailand at the Athens Olympics. In the film's much-hyperbolised chase sequence – a ransack of street vendors and foot traffic throughout the dilapidated nooks 'n' crannies of downtown Bangkok – Jaa proceeds to elude a mob of heavies by dodging a rush hour of obstacles. The scene plays out like a frenetic platform video game, only remarkably without the aid of artifice. With Jaa hurdling moving vehicles and diving through strategically placed barbed wire hoops with such phenomenal nonchalance, one gets the impression that even a career in track & field or the Cirque du Soleil wouldn't be an impossibility.

Why precisely this film manages to buck the trend though, isn't purely in the discovery of Tony Jaa, but in Pinkaew's reinvention – or rather, uninvention – of genre. Whereas the rest of Asia seems obsessed with finding new ways to makeover an Eastern staple, all Ong-Bak wants to do is take a DeLorean and go back to when the martial arts movie was built around its star, not its director. Ong-Bak is pure, grassroots martial arts in this sense: where Tony Jaa is the film, and Prachya Pinkaew is there as his sparring partner. Ambitiously marketed as the next Bruce Lee-slash-Jackie Chan-slash-Jet Li, the film's enthusiasm for its lead is for once justified – not since Drunken Master II has a martial arts film so unanimously rallied around its star, tailoring each pan, tilt and slow motion replay to the tune of his every telescopic move.

Similarly, the plot – if you want to call it that – is a casualty of Jaa's overwhelming physical charisma, martyred to allow the greater film to shine through as a display cabinet for his considerable talents (although acting is not one of them). Available since 2004 in a manifold of DVD releases – none of which, by the way, were English subtitled – part of the cult of Ong-Bak in world-wide-web circles was that it didn't matter if you couldn't speak the language. Subtitled or not, the film's action spoke in the absence of a translation, or a plot for that matter.

Summoned from his rural backwater after a former villager steals his people's sacred Buddha statue, Ting's (Tony Jaa) vocation is to simply get it back. And hurt a lot of people along the way. Through this infliction of pain, it's the film's numerous fight scenes and reckless abandonment of human safety – a nostalgic time warp to the days when Jackie Chan would throw himself from buildings with little more than hope to break his fall – that sponges any kind of void left by the narrative dustbowl. Rarely if ever has the plot of a hardcore martial arts film attempted to transcend the genre's innate violence, and for better or worse, Ong-Bak intends to keep it that way.

Tag-team this with the pre-digital heydays of Hong Kong cinema, where kung fu movies were just as irresponsible – performers used to hit each other for real, and injuries were so frequent that entire end credit sequences were created in their honour. In Ong-Bak, there isn't a single moment convincing enough to validate the disclaimer that humans were not harmed in the making of this movie. Eye sockets are elbowed; kidneys toe-jammed; heads head-butted; torsos broken in half by leaping kneecap pile-drivers. Far from the traditional melee devices of punching and kicking, Pinkaew and fight choreographe Panna Rittikrai appropriate the under-exploited discipline of Muay Thai kickboxing, knocking the film into both an infomercial for the devastating martial art, and a riotous crowd-agitator at once. Anyone who attended closing night at the NZIFF can vouch for this: so often a passive audience-type, the Embassy that night felt more like Madison Square Garden in the clutch of a heavyweight championship bout.

For a film that's ultimately trying to wind back the clock, there's a surprising likeness to the old Hollywood musical at hand – where the beginning, middle and end was only ever as good as the song and dance in between. Like that great American genre, Ong-Bak shunts itself forward with periodic "action" chorography; it's toe tapping and pirouetting of a different kind, yet the film's stomach is lined in the same digestible building blocks that made musicals a foolproof mainstay of the Golden Era. And at its fundamental best, we're talking about a film that hasn't just gone old-school, but primeval. Ong-Bak's remasculation of the current martial arts cinema isn't really about the absence of smooching or gliding or Zhang Ziyi then, or the notion of antagonism and violence, but in the base male psyche of two things: hunting and gathering. Love might make the world go round, but in Prachya Pinkaew's universe, the earth's orbit can come to a screeching halt if it has too.