Just so...so bad

From my favorite movies..

A Disappointing Continuation

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

I don't know what these people are talking about. This movie was badass as far as the action. There was a lot of "parkour" type of stunts, 80% of it was combat fighting and fleeing on construction like broken buildings and wire fences and all over warehouses. There was a lot of smashing, running, kicking, striking, flipping, rolling, climbing, tumbling, throwing...it was amazing what people can do with their bodies with the right training. The direction caught every move perfectly. It wasn't shaky or messy or badly angled. The music was energetic and energizing. I was never bored. I never skipped anything, I only replayed fighting moves. As far as the acting, the comedy was perfect, and perhaps foreigners don't appreciate it and natives from Thailand who weren't impressed might be easily embarrassed or something but I found it funny at least. There was one scene where the manager, a business partner called Sompong, a fighter on their side, and a female friend are hiding out from an enemy. And in most movies when characters are hiding out they keep quiet and it normally works, then they exhale really loudly in relief and stay alive. Well in this movie one of the guys hiding farted LOL. And he gave their hiding spot away, and they couldn't take the smell of his fart so they ran out and exposed themselves. I'm sorry but that was hilarious, I kept laughing even when the scene was over. The Thai actors were good and I've seen some Thai movies so I know by now their humor can be on the silly side. But the foreign actors were so cringe. I don't know if the Russian and Japanese actors had accents, or if those were speech impediments... And the Thai- American and the main villain the white guy, they didn't seem to take this seriously at all. But whatever. Their part was to sit and bid on the hero fighters.There's a love story, some rivalries and grudge matches, girl fighters (their moves were pansy though, I'm waiting for a combat action movie where the girl's martial arts isn't all about agility but power and brutality too...). I liked it and told pretty much everyone I came across today to watch it.

Another all-action martial arts offering from Panna Rittikrai, the guy who's kept Thai action cinema alive for the past thirty years or so. Unfortunately, KNOCKOUT(they dropped the BANGKOK for the British release) is one of his lesser offerings. For those who complained about the paucity of the storyline in WARRIOR KING, you ain't seen nothing yet: the surrounding storyline in this film is amateurish in the extreme, a kind of riff on THE CONDEMNED which sees a bunch of characters thrown together in an old abandoned warehouse and forced to fight for their lives.The film it's closest to in terms of scope is Rittikrai's original BORN TO FIGHT, made back in the '80s. All the requisite elements of Thai action cinema are present: masked, ninja-style assassins, goons on motorbikes flying through the air, scenery being broken and destroyed, people thrown from great heights. The fight scenes are enjoyable, although they lack the kind of finesse of the classic Tony Jaa outings: there seems to be no distinct beginning, middle and end to them, the film just depicts an ongoing melee situation and the bad guys are faceless and dull.The use of multiple characters for the heroes was a bad idea. It worked in the BORN TO FIGHT remake, where each member of the athletics team had their own special skill clearly delineated. Here, though, the use of different styles wasn't clear; I didn't even realise they were being used until I watched the short making-of documentary afterwards. Mostly, the fights just consist of people running up walls, jumping and kicking people in the head. It's fun, but highly derivative.The cast are pretty rubbish – these are the kinds of guys who make a good stunt team, but who are hopeless as characters we're supposed to get behind and root for. The melodrama scenes are overstated and, even worse, there's an obnoxious comic relief character we're stuck with for a long, long time. While there are a few familiar faces in minor parts, the only actor I really recognised was Rittikrai himself, playing another merciless fighter with a twist – this time, he's got asthma. You can guess the outcome.

The first half an hour of this film is a bore. I know they are trying to introduce us to the cast and maybe flesh out the characters a bit but there are simply to many characters and it was a bit of a pointless exercise. I thought I'd carry on watching despite the really poor acting and lack of any real plot. All I can say is I'm glad I did because the martial arts action in this film is breathtaking. When it starts it is fast ferocious and continuous. Maybe because of the lack of any real character development you don't care about any of them. It is great watching some realistic looking punches and kicks landing with satisfying thuds. Even the women take kicks and punches and get up to fight back. Some of the stunts don't quite work like the guy in the car trying to run over people and crashing through the obvious to see paper thin wall. This is no IP Man or Ong Bak but still not a bad film.

Since Ong Bak, i have started watching Thai Martial Arts movie. To be honest i think the Muay Thai is a great art to watch, and usually the Thais are going for hard hitting, like some people mentioned, you can see the hits connect, the dust created by it and such. On the action parts, this movie is an A+, great fighting scenes, and even if they showcase some obvious choreography, the way they are film really make them look more real than your traditional Chinese kung fu/American kickboxing movie.But another thing that i realize watching Thai movies, its that usually the story is pretty bad. Most of them revolve around some little village traditional artifacts being stolen and our hero go get them back in the big city. Other times, they try something different but it always fail. Here they tried doing "The Running Man" kinda story. It could had worked, but it got a bit too goofy for me at some points, and lets say that you don't really get into the story that much. Anyway mostly this movie is a big fighting sequence past the first half hour and this is what you can expect from a Thai movie, not more, not less. If one day Thais come out with a very good story, i will be the first to applause. Maybe i identify myself more to American MA movies, being a Caucasian, but i got hooked a lot into Chinese or Japanese movies as well cause they had excellent stories. Im sure Thais can come out with one , one day.