Tom-Yum-Goong (Warrior King)

For UK distribution, Prachya Pinkaew’s second collaboration with martial arts sensation Tony Jaa has been given the bland English title Warrior King. Given the film’s jostle of flavours, the Thai title, Tom-Yum-Goong – the name of a traditional hot and sour soup – is much more appropriate. Emboldened by the success of the pair’s Ong-Bak (2003), which first established Jaa as an action superstar in the Jackie Chan mould, Warrior King risks an uneven tone with its heady mix of twee sentimentality, broad humour and underworld nastiness, but the director skips through these shifting moods with limbered confidence.

Opting for broken bones over narrative sinew, Pinkaew recycles Ong-Bak’s skeletal plot to frame Jaa’s Muay Thai skills in a series of body-splintering, no-wires fight sequences. Jaa again plays a country boy, this time called Kham, who sets off for the big city in pursuit of gangsters who have stolen prized property, in this case pet elephant Por Yai and its calf Korn. Early scenes give little hint of the mayhem to follow, establishing a teasing lull before Kham is spurred into action: sequences in the Thai village which show Kham being carried along in the elder elephant’s tusks or giving the beast a scrub down in the river are bathed in the roseate soft focus of rural tranquillity.

The pachyderm-like slowness of this opening is soon compensated for. When the elephants are abducted and whisked away to Australia, Kham is quickly on a plane in pursuit, heading straight to Sydney’s Thaitown. Jaa’s character in Ong-Bak was encumbered with a pacifism bred into him by his mentor, and so refused to lift a combative finger except when coaxed or tricked into the ring. Kham has no such qualms: tracing his animals to Tom-Yom-Goong, a Thai restaurant run by transsexual femme fatale Madame Rose (Jin Xing), he lets rip on dozens of her henchmen, demanding ‘where is my elephant?’ through the blur of flailing limbs. This culminates in a mind-boggling four-minute take when, having learned of the demise of Por Yai, Kham defends himself against a roomful of people, relentlessly laying waste to all-comers.

Pinkaew builds on his breakthrough film with a bigger, brasher appeal to global markets, clearly relishing a larger budget, an overseas shoot and the challenge (with the help of famed choreographer Panna Rithikrai) of making the fight scenes match up to those that made his name. This more-is-more approach has not stifled the blithe peppiness that animated Ong-Bak. There is still as little time for women, Australians are depicted as either corrupt or stupid, and the comedy scenes featuring Thaitown beat cop Sergeant Mark (Phetthai Wongkamlao) are less appealing than the film’s scattering of playful in-jokes, which include a cameo by a Jackie Chan doppelganger. Nevertheless, there is a buoyancy to the film that inclines one to overlook its shortcomings, perhaps because its arrogance is not yet the hubris of the Hollywood action movie but the temerity of a cocky upstart.

This review features in the September 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.