Since the success of the martial arts actioner Ong Bak (2003), the Thai have churned out a long string of fairly low-budget action movies featuring wild stunts and lots of kick-boxing and general brawling. The quality of these movies is uneven to say the least. To my mind, one of the most successful was Chocolate (2008), which introduced the female fighting sensation JeeJa Yanin, playing an autistic martial arts prodigy. That idea was no doubt copied from Jet Li’s Danny the Dog (a.k.a. Unleashed, 2005), but it worked well. However, Thailand is not a great movie nation, and it’s the rule rather than the exception that action and martial arts movies are based on previous formulas, esp. those found in Hong Kong movies (or, of course, Hollywood movies. I remember how the Spider-Man inspired Mercury Man (2006) was ripped by local reviewers for not being original and ”home-made” enough). Ong Bak was a fairly original idea, taking its point of origin in the rural heartland of the Thai nation, and it inspired several sequels and inferior knock-offs, including such titles as Born to Fight (2004) and The Protector (a.k.a. Tom yum goong, 2005), which I personally gave a mediocre rating (4 or 5 out of 10), but which have successfully attracted an international audience. And so more of these movies are naturally produced.
In Brave from 2007, Thai stuntman Michael B. (a.k.a. Piroj Boongerd), who did stunts for both Ong Bak and Born to Fight, gets to be the leading man in an urban martial arts action-comedy which is low on story but nicely packed with fighting. He plays a capable martial arts fighter, known only as B., who recently did a stint in jail because, as far as I can glean, some bad guys set him up. As he is released from jail, the same thing happens again. His cousin (whom, out of reverence, he calls ”Brother”) is kidnapped, and in order to save his life, B. has to enter a bank and use his skills to force the executives to transfer all the customer data onto a memory stick. As it turns out, the criminals and the executives are associated with each other in complex ways that combine in a very unsuccessful attempt to make up a coherent plot which unfolds halfway backwards. The script writers didn’t spend a lot of time on the story, and many important elements are entirely left out, esp. as concerns the characters’ backgrounds. B. apparently had this girlfriend before he went to jail, and he looks her up when he comes out, but for some reason her brother (a former friend of B.) is involved with the bad guys, and the girlfriend suddenly has three children, but their father is never mentioned (and no, it’s not B.’s kids). The rest of the plot is just as messy, and doesn’t make any kind of sense.
And then there’s the comedy. Asian movies have a tendency to combine serious drama and ridiculous comedy in ways that makes Western audiences go ”WTF?!”, and this movie does, too. There is an enormous amount of silly giggling, panting and whimpering, just like in certain bad kung fu movies from the early ’80s, and I can only assume that some Asian audiences find this kind of thing smashingly funny. Well, not me. To be blunt, plot, characterisation and comedy are all ineffectual and combine to make a disappointingly dull movie.
However, the movie may be worthwhile for fans of martial art stunts and pure fighting. It has a great and protracted fight 30 minutes in, and another and even longer one 60 minutes in. It’s nice, but I really would have preferred that there were an acceptable story to go with it. In as thin a narrative context as this, even the decent fight scenes become boring.
The disc itself, picture quality and all, is okay, but there are no extras except for some trailers for movies that generally look pretty bad. The subtitles are not as bad as in some Asian movies, but a lot of the comedy especially seems to have been lost in translation. Which probably amounts to an improvement.
If you want to see a funny Thai action-comedy, seek out the very entertaining and irreverent Sars Wars (2004). It’s got bad CGI, but it’ll keep you in plenty of laughs and action.
Brave is out on DVD 12th September 2011.
Directors: Thanapon Maliwan and Afdlin Shauki
Cast: Michael B., Afdlin Shauki, Dean Alexandrou and others
Runtime: 92 min.
Country: Thailand
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