Ong Bak 2 (2008)

Ong Bak 2 arrives from 2008 bearing the weary obligations of a sequel, though it insists on calling itself a standalone prequel, a distinction that matters to accountants and to nobody else. Tony Jaa directs and stars as Tien, a nobleman's son who loses his family to treachery, is captured by slavers, rescued by bandits, and spends the remainder of the running time hitting people with escalating commitment. The plot is a scaffold for elbows. We have seen this scaffold before, and we will see it again.

That is not a complaint. It is a classification. The film concerns itself with vengeance, crocodiles, elephants, and the proper application of the three-section staff. It never pauses to instruct us on how to feel about any of it, which in the current climate registers as a small mercy. There is a slave trade in the narrative, presented as scenery through which our hero punches, not as an indictment to be recited back at us. The women exist, briefly, and are permitted to be people instead of arguments. The cast is Thai because the story is Thai, and the camera never stops to congratulate itself for that fact.

We search the frame for a message and find only bruises. The climax involves a mentor's ritual suicide, a broken sword, an ambiguous statue, and a promotional obligation to sell tickets for a third installment. Nothing here is engineered to improve the viewer's politics or to flatter the viewer's virtue. It is a man performing a spinning kick in period costume, and it is content to be exactly that. This restraint is now rare enough to feel like an artifact. The film's cultural awareness extends to knowing which end of the katana is the pointy one. A modest achievement, and in its way, a restful one. The sommelier sets down the glass and finds nothing to swirl.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}