Taste the fury.
A Thai martial arts action thriller, where an autistic young teenage girl, Zen (JeeJa Yanin), learns to fight by copying moves used in martial arts classes next door and from TV shows and movies. It is a B-movie graced by a series of beautifully staged fight scenes between the girl and different groups of gangsters.
As for the plot, I was not entirely clear about people's roles or relationships but, in essence, Zin (Ammara Siripong), her Thai mother, and Masashi (Hiroshi Abe), her Japanese father, were mixed up in the world of organised crime, and her father had to return to Japan before she was born. She grows up autistic, becomes transfixed by people doing martial arts training, takes to working out herself.
Her only friend is Moom (Taphon Phopwandee), a much-bullied fat kid, who discovers she is able to catch anything thrown at her from whatever direction, and uses this as a money-making scheme, getting her to perform in public for donations. When somebody throws a knife at her and she catches it, he realises he has something special, and when a gang of teens attack them, her fighting ability is triggered.
Then Zin, the girl's mother, falls ill with cancer, and they desperately need large amounts of money for treatment and medicine. The boy finds a debt book amongst the mother's possessions, with names of local debtors and the sums that they owe, presumably as protection money to a gangster organisation. The boy realises that this money would pay for the mother's treatment, and he takes the girl with him to start collecting the debts...
Compared to Kill Bill 1, for example, for me, this is preferable. This is grittier, more authentic in setting and feel. The boy Moom is a believable and interesting character, and in the lead role of Zen, JeeJa Yani is very sympathetically portrayed and has amazing athleticism. The stunts are very well staged, and the end credits includes, Jackie Chan like, a series of injury clips, showing how arduous the stunts were, and how they were done in real life, not with digital effects, The villains, however, crime boss Number 8 (Pongpat Wachirabunjong) and his henchwoman, Priscilla (Sirimongkol Iamthuam), are completely two dimensional, with little plausible motivation, and a laughably foolish set of henchmen and henchwomen, who insist on throwing themselves into the fight despite the piles of bodies of their colleagues already littering the floor.
The very definition of a well done genre movie.
- Director: Prachya Pinkaew, martial arts choreography by Panna Rittikrai
- Writers: Chookiat Sakveerakul, Napalee
- Starring: JeeJa Yanin, Hiroshi Abe, Pongpat Wachirabunjong, Taphon Phopwandee, Yanin Vismitananda
- Rating: Matinee
- When seen: 15 June 2012
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
Written in WriteRoom, formatted using HyperEdit, posted from my MacBook Pro
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