It’s been a crazy ass week, and I barely managed to gather my thoughts for anything remotely toward film before now, and this is as I’m currently tracking more festival coverage before the month is out. Thus, I kinda wanna get my head back in gears having just reviewed one movie currently in drafts and paid tribute to another, with Tony Jaa in mind as we look back on his 2003 trilogy-starting breakout, Ong Bak.
Jaa was a godsend to an industry ready for a reboot, and boy did he give us one. Riding the new wave of action fandom for the new millenium alongside stalwarts like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Donnie Yen and Jung Doo-hung, Jaa, accompanied by director Prachya Pinkaew and the stylings of action director Panna Rittikrai, laid clear an ambitious path of action stardom, setting a standard akin to the glory days of yesteryear Hong Kong thrills and paving the way for other stars to share the limelight.
Ong Bak, the story of a village boy thrust into Bangkok’s seedy streets and underworld circuits to make his village whole and retrieve a stolen Buddha head from ruthless gangster and his roided up bodyguard, was a film I couldn’t get a hold of soon enough. I bought the film on VCD from eThaiCD the first chance I got, and eventually (albeit accidentally) bought a bootleg version of it in Times Square the same day I saw it in a theatre, long prior to actually buying a legit DVD copy from the Virgin Megastore in Times Square when it was still around.
The trailer for this movie was explosive, and nothing like I’d ever seen apart from the daredevil spectacle seen in Rumble In The Bronx and other films that followed. Jaa did his own stunts, suffered his share of injuries, and helped make a movie that ushered in a new generation of martial arts movie fans.
The decade that would follow would see a continuation and, much to our chagrin, a gradual decline in the kind stunt-loaded Thai action cinema that defined Asian film in the early 2000s. It certainly didn’t help that the legendary Rittikrai would pass away in 2014 from a slew of ailments, lending a definitive blow to an era of martial arts and action cinema that had grown immensely in part from Rittikrai, whose body of work is still being very much discovered by fans alike.
To this, I yield my own salute to Ong Bak, to Jaa, an enduring talent whose star continues to shine to this day, and to future Thai action prospects making the case for their own posterity in the trade. With any luck, last year’s announcement of a TV show based on the hit film will actually flourish and not just be another footnote in fan-baiting, and for that matter, will hopefully be a fantastic show for all of us.
