Reader Recommendations: Ong-Bak

After I watched "Ip Man", a lot of you guys told me to watch “Ong-Bak”. I remember hearing about this movie when I was young, but didn’t care too much about it. So today, I finally decided to watch this movie and I am quite glad. Sadly because the only other martial arts movie I saw this year has been Ip Man, I will be doing a lot of comparison with it. Click the jump to read what I thought.

The story of this movie is quite simple; Don steals Buddha’s (called Ong Bak) head from Ting’s small village. The village counts on Ting to go to Bangkok (teheheheh Bangkok) and get the head back from Don. On his trip over there, Ting accidently enters a fight club where he is forced to fight. He needs to fight his way to the mob boss to get the head back. The story is short and simple and it works. I cannot complain about it, because I was expecting an action movie and not a deep and meaningful movie.

THAT STANCE

Though I must admit, there is a lot in this movie I did not like. For one, I hated the acting of everyone besides Ting. It was over exaggerated and annoying, usually I don’t care for bad acting but this time it really threw me out of the mood of the movie. Another thing about this flick that annoyed me is the beginning was a too boring, it took forever for the action to start and like I said before. The acting is not fun, so this filler stuff between fights were not fun. At least in Ip Man, the filler parts were somewhat interesting and fun to watch.

But none of that matters, because the fight scenes are amazing! Holy cow this movie’s martial arts were epic. I was amazed at how well choreographed these fights were, and I am sure Tony Jaa (Ting) did all his stunts. And they were all well done and great. All these fight scenes totally made up for the weak acting and boring filler material. Another thing I liked about this movie, the music that would cue in during the fights were perfect. It really got the mood right and fit the fights just perfectly.

To sum it all up, watch this movie, but be prepared for some boring parts. I still thought Ip Man was better in all accounts, from the fighting to the story. But by far this Thai movie was great and I now I am hungry for some Thai, so if you don’t mind I am going to cut this blog short and get some Thai food. I hope you guys enjoy this movie as much as I did!