Ong-Bak 2: The Sequel That Really Isn't a Sequel

To continue the trilogy of Ong-Bak, I watched Ong-Bak 2 today. I thought this trilogy was in some chronological order, but it is not. This movie barely has any relationship to the first movie; the only thing that stays the same is the main actor, Tony Jaa. Which is weird, because this movie takes place in the 1400’s whereas the first movie takes place is a somewhat present time. This does not ruin the movie all too much, but it is sort of a creation story for Tein (Jaa). Now how does it compare to the first movie? Click more to find out.

The story was quite obscure, because the movie does a lot of jumping around between time periods; it was hard to get what the story was, but it seemed to be that Tein’s father was killed by an opposing tribe. Tein is saved by a loyal solider and picked up by a guerrilla group that later trains him to be a killing machine. After he has trained, he goes on a quest to find the murder of his father to seek vengeance. Again, a rather weak story and I am not a big fan of it. I even prefer the first movies story a little bit more but this is a martial arts movie, and I am in it for the amazing fight scenes not the plot development.

What do you mean you've never fought on top of an elephant?

Now I do love the fight scenes, they are all amazing and well done. Only thing though, I was expecting more hand on hand martial arts but what I got was that and more. There were fight scenes with weapons such as swords, dao and even a sweet 3 section staff, which kind of looks like a nun chuck but with 3 sections and as big as a man’s body. The fight scenes were a bit more polished and had small amounts of special effects added on to the fight which was nice.

Now my complaints, firstly even with all the action scenes the movie felt like it dragged on. What I mean is that this movie is an hour and thirty minutes, the first hour is them explaining and going about their story. And there were hardly any fighting in that time period so it was long and boring. Yes, there was a rather interesting fight with a young Tein and an alligator but that was all. Secondly, the filler part in the movie REALLLY sucked, so badly that it made the movie unwatchable. There were many of moments were I would just pause the movie, watch grass grow so that I woudn't get too bored of the movie, and then resume it. Lastly, the ending was almost non-existent. It consisted of a 5 minute dialogued from the king from the bad tribe about how Tein should suffer and feel the pain and then CUT. That is it; this all follows a 20 minute awesome fight sequence. This is the movie equivalent of getting blue balled.

My last words are simple, do not see this movie. I forbid you to, it is that bad. The first one, go see it, enjoy the movie. But if you really want to see this movie, just fast forward to all the awesome fight scenes and save yourself of an hour of crap, you can thank me later. This movie leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I am scared to see the third movie now, thinking it can only be worse.