film, eyeballs, brain

Earlier this year, when I was still teaching, I was supposed to teach a summer class on Southeast Asian cultures and literatures. That didn’t happen, unfortunately, but I did get to the point where I had constructed a syllabus, and had attempted to shoehorn some ”representative” Thai film into it, whatever that meant. (I ended up selecting the very likely unrepresentative Mysterious Object at Noon, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, to be loosely connected with what I was going to argue as a “specifically Southeast Asian mode of storytelling”, but that went nowhere.)

Prachya Pinkaew’s violent film The Protector (Tom-Yum-Goong), deep in its sentimental heart, is about a man named Kham and his love for his elephants. The action superstar Tony Jaa is the last of a line of elephant guards for the King of Thailand, and when a gang of poachers capture his elephant and his calf, Kham runs off to Sydney in an attempt to bring them back. Along the way there’s drug-running gangsters, the notion that Australian functionaries are apparently as corrupt as their Thai counterparts, and a gang of rollerblading, fluorescent bulb-wielding thugs. (I’m tempted to read deeper into the movie by juxtaposing the Viet- / Sino- / homo- phobic discourse — for instance, the evil Triad Queen is played by the transgendered ballerina Xing Jin — with Kham’s defense of Thai national patrimony, but why bother?)

The narrative is much like those in recent Hollywood action movies, which is to say, dreadfully sloppy. (I don’t think this is a “specifically Southeast Asian mode of storytelling” either.) Characters, motivations, settings, and the explanations for each are all rubbish on the roadside as we barrel from one action scene to another. This is reinforced with the film’s referencing of the Street Fighter videogame, where Jaa has a series of knee-and-elbow showdowns with a multicultural cast of fighters (a Wushu guy, a Capoeira fighter, and a giant pissed-off wrestler). Inside a burning and flooded Buddhist temple, no less.

The real attraction here is Jaa, mostly distinguished by the fact that he utilizes neither CGI nor wire-fu. He’s been compared positively to Jackie Chan, but the grimly sober Jaa (granted, he’s quite anxious about his pachyderms) has neither Chan’s inventiveness nor his charm, and it’s not enough to carry such a plot-thin movie. (Chan is pretty much the only action star I know that seems to have a perpetual twinkle in his eye while he dispatches enemies.)

The Protector can really be boiled down to just two scenes, but they’re thrilling, jawdropping wonders. The first is a long, uninterrupted scene where Jaa fights his way up to a restaurant’s top floor; it’s a parodic version of Michael Ballhaus’s famous tracking shot in Goodfellas, except that you have Ray Liotta pushing bodies off a balcony. The second scene — a bone-crunching showdown between Jaa and 50 black-clad baddies that must have prompted a team of Foley artists to work overtime — even has a smidgen of Video Art to it: 50 Different Ways to Break a Limb, as it were. (They’re all different too, I swear.) But there’s little point in watching all the dross around it just to get to the marrow: about ten minutes of screen time. As with porn, you might as well fast-forward to the good bits.

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Possibly related posts:

1. Tim Burton, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005).
2. Neill dela Llana and Ian Gamazon, “Cavite” (2005).
3. Peter Jackson, “King Kong” (2005).