November 21st, 2009
Ong Bak 2: Muay Thai Boogaloo
The film that almost made Tony Jaa go all Col. Kurtz on everyone as a result of soul-crushing directorial pressures and scary budgetary overruns has been available in the United States and elsewhere for a while now. I saw it on a plane ride overseas, and I’ve been waiting for the right time to discuss it. Although I loved the film’s final reveal, the ending isn’t remotely what you might expect from an all-out action movie. On the bright side, he didn’t spend the whole movie looking for an elephant and/or precious artifact. As a conversation starter, I’d like to pose this question to those that have seen the film:
What do you think of Ong Bak 2’s ending? Is it a cliffhanger? A philosophical anti-climax? What? How did you interpret it?
December 2nd, 2009 at 2:05 am
“Revenge sucks.”
If I didn’t already know that there was a sequel incoming, I would have been even more surprised by the ending to OB2 then I was already. There’s another movie coming out, so I know that the very much finality of the film I saw tonight probably won’t quite hold, the hero will get a chance to dust himself off, get angry all over again, and beat the snot out of that evil king and goth dude.
Or will he? As Jaa’s character’s extreme thirst for revenge is what brought him to an even more ruinous situation and horrified the women he loves. He built himself into an unstoppable weapon, but at the end he’s discovered the limits of how far anger and skill can take him. It would be highly disingenuous if he’s just able to recover and kick further ass the sequel, as the film made quite clear that, well, revenge sucks, and he had to pay for his desire for bloodshed.
I don’t quite get what’s going on with the goth dude, is he some sort of bizarro Jaa (I can master this elephant too, ha ha) or what? But I wouldn’t put it past them. The movie really doesn’t end so much on a cliffhanger as it does in what feels like somewhere within a larger narrative. I don’t believe the ending Ong-Bak 2 was the logical, or even planned endpoint for the film, but for what it is, it will do, and it even got me thinking a bit, which isn’t something I would have ever thought I would get out of a flying elbows and knees movie, so good job Tony!