Dig Dash and his World of Social Commentary: madness

When a movie is just a series of excuses to beat the shit out of everyone for 90 minutes, that’s called action porn. Jason Statham makes one of these every three months. I think the plot to his last movie was that he got his dick caught in a pile of meat and the only way to get it out was drag racing against the President of Tits.

In 2003, Tony Jaa made Ong Bak and changed the face of action porn forever. It was the kind of movie where a guy would go looking for his village’s missing statue head and accidentally walk through an underground martial arts tournament and then accidentally win it. In one scene, he dumped his leg in oil, lit it on fire, did a 360 off a truck and kicked a guy with it. For you ladies that don’t know anything about finishing moves, that’s like killing a guy so hard that four of his Facebook posts disappear.

I interviewed him during the film’s press tour and I made his translator ask him if that stunt man that he fire-kicked was dead. His tiny people are so tough that in the Thai language, the phrase to ask this is only ONE WORD LONG. Before the interview, Tony Jaa did a demonstration where he kicked a basketball off the top of a stack of stuntmen mid-backflip. I can verify with my own eyes that Tony Jaa is computer generated. Either that or he’s some kind of puppet.

Tom-Yum-Goong: Now With 50 Percent Less Plot
After Ong Bak, Mr. Jaa made Tom-Yum-Goong. Somewhere along the way, he decided that patching action scenes together with plot was a waste of everyone’s time. So if Ong Bak was his Debbie Does Dallas, Tom-Yum-Goong was his Best of Buttholes 17: Six Hours of Butthole Blasting Action!

Actually, most people call Tom-Yum-Goong “Where’s my Goddamn Elephant!?” because every scene is him bursting into a room hoping to find his elephant. And if that fails, plan B is punching fucking everything. I honestly don’t know how they afforded to pay all the stunt actors he annihilated. My theory is that they just shot Tony Jaa up with gamma radiation and followed him with a camera as he rampaged. Tom-Yum-Goong probably means “#59. Reality Show With Lemongrass and Coconut Milk (spicy).”

Ong Bak 2: Karate Karate Karate!
While starring in Ong Bak 2, Tony Jaa directed it himself. Historically, this type of thing has always worked out for the best. When Jean-Claude Van Damme was given creative control of a movie, the first thing he did was cast an extra Jean-Claude Van Damme and call it Double Impact. And no one will soon forget the first movie Steven Segal directed, On Deadly Ground; 67 minutes of which were actually used in Best of Buttholes 17: Six Hours of Butthole Blasting Action!

Ong Bak 2 doesn’t even try for a plot. It makes home videos of me opening an Ewok Village look like tight, meaningful screenplays. Ong Bak 2 is a movie based on a six-year-old’s description of the men tazing him. And it’s… you know, I think it’s awesome?

So Much Action the Director Goes Insane
Tony Jaa’s action scenes take a lot of work to film. Let’s look at the facts: If a scene calls for 60 ninjas, it takes 10 weeks to find them, even if they’re in the same elevator as you. Then you have to teach them all the choreography so they’re not just randomly vanishing or turning into dragons. By the time you’re done, all your camera men are cut in half because that’s how people sharpen their swords in Thailand.

Now the real problem is that every scene in the movie is like that. It goes from insane fight scene to epic war scene like someone stuffed cocaine and focus testing data into a Nintendo until it finished a screenplay. The Persian army would have looked at the call sheet for Ong Bak 2 and said, “Where the fuck are we going to get 1600 archers? And 3800 nunchucks!? That’s got to be like twice the entire world’s nunchuck population.”

This grueling pace apparently took its toll on Tony Jaa, who had to direct, train and kick the shit out of every single able-bodied actor in the country. Luckily, all Thai hospitals have a Tony Jaa wing where they treat victims of Tony Jaa. Unluckily, there is no branch of Thai medicine devoted to treating Tony Jaa himself. So after fighting off dozens of 15th century armies, he had a nervous breakdown and disappeared into the jungle, halting production for months.

Tony Jaa has since debunked this rumor, saying production stopped over some kind of money issue. But I got all this information off the Internet, so I’m going to choose to believe the jungle one. If you all get to believe that Barack Obama’s health care plan is nerve gassing babies then I get to believe Tony Jaa ran into the woods to live with panthers. I… I love him.

A Love Letter to Fighter Nerds
Whatever storyline Ong Bak 2 has is taken from best six seconds of the movie every child wrote while training for his or her yellow belt. Tony Jaa’s character is raised by pirates who teach him every martial art there has ever been. And it comes in handy because Ong Bak 2 adheres to the rule that martial arts are an elaborate version of rock-paper-scissors. For example, Kenjutsu beats rope dart, but rope dart beats Teen Wolf. Which is why I’m now calling that game Kenjutsu-rope dart-Teen Wolf.

Before Tony Jaa, most action porn caters to a very specific type of audience– guys who write in to Maxim to ask how much beer a titty can hold. Ong Bak 2 has any kind of action porn you might be into. The pirates teach Tony Jaa wing chun, Choi Lei Fut, samurai swording, cartwheel, Magic Missile, poetry repair, wax off, death blossom, shoryuken, robot attack and Hung Ga, a style of kung fu started when Jackie Chan went back in time to show ancient monks how to look like they’re shitting their pants. UPDATE: This was not an illusion.

There’s a scene where Tony Jaa gets drunk and kills a village full of slave traders with a combination of drunken boxing and breakdancing. Then later, he fights off one ninja with Muay Boran and another with five-animal kung fu at the same time. One pirate taught him a combination of stage magic and Silat, and another pirate’s martial art was just being the, holy shit, master of hand grenades. If I would have read this paragraph I’m typing right now when I was 10 years old, experts would be baffled at how much semen could come out of one screaming boy. Some of them would probably take samples for testing before we realized there was no such thing as pre-teen semen experts and called the police.

A Series of Boss Fights
I may have mentioned earlier how Tony Jaa doesn’t give a fuck. So when he saw a series of pages in the screenplay that linked one event to another, he crossed them out and scribbled in “Fight Half-Cat/Half-Vampire Lady in a Cave. Check to see if part of her could also be dune buggy.” Then he wrote a memo that said, “Find this screenwriter who loves plot so much, dress him like a sexy peanut, and leave him with the horny elephants.” Another phrase in Thai that only takes one word.

Every time you think something is about to make sense, Tony Jaa is blindsided by some new boss. At one point, he escapes an army by climbing onto an elephant that he earlier punched, only to find a mysterious woman with raven powers. She beats the hell out of him and flies off, never to be seen again. That’s how tired Tony Jaa was when he made this movie– he forgot to introduce, explain or defeat his own boss monsters.

The Ending: What the Fucking Fuck
In its current state, Ong Bak 2 is like 90 minutes of ancient 911 call transcripts played in no particular order. However, it has an American distributor, and may get a theatrical release here anyway. So I shouldn’t spoil the ending.

I can say this, though: The ending is so gay that Phil Collins keeps a workout bag in its mouth. It’s so gay that it’s illegal to finish watching Ong Bak 2 in a public restroom. The ending is so gay that if you wrote it, your father would tell you that he’s proud of you no matter what you choose to be.

With that out of the way, SPOILER: Tony Jaa is beaten unconscious by the second half of the movie’s endless stream of boss fights. It then fades to black and a voice over informs us that if everyone truly believes in their heart, we–the audience–can make his life better. You might remember this from when you and your clapping brought Tinkerbell back to life in Peter Pan. If the 500 guys beating Tony Jaa to death were to put down their weapons and gently apply his lipstick with their penises, it would be a tougher ending. And clear up a few more plot holes.

Supposedly, this ending is a cliffhanger for Ong Bak 3 and not a commercial for moustache condoms. But at the rate at which Tony Jaa is removing the plot from each of his successive films, Ong Bak 3 is just going to be him cliffdiving into a woodchipper while motorcycles jump him. And I will give it another A+.