The Protector (2005)
Directed by Prachya Pinkaew
A young fighter named Kham must go to Australia to retrieve his stolen elephant. With the help of a Thai-born Australian detective, Kham must take on all comers, including a gang led by an evil woman and her two deadly bodyguards.
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9 films that influenced The Protector
What critics say influenced The Protector
When Jackie Chan shares a brief moment with Tony Jaa early in "The Protector," we could be witnessing the passing of the torch from one martial-arts master to another, or simply a nod of respect from a hot young star to one of his most illustrious predecessors.
There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline).
If Chan (who has a cameo in The Protector) seems made of rubber, with the face of a melancholic clown, Jaa is pure steel, with the face of a stubborn country boy.
The sequence, an eye-popping homage to Bruce Lee's "Game of Death," is done, incredibly, in one shot.
The Protector actually seems a bit nostalgic for the days of such Bruce Lee classics as Enter the Dragon and Fist of Fury .
(In one intentionally over-the-top scene recalling one of The Bride’s adventures from “Kill Bill,” Cam cracks about 30 limbs on at least that many enemies, each injury accompanied by a brutal KRRRRK on the soundtrack.)
The Protector is no Kill Bill .
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It’s far more impressive than the whole mind-numbing 96-minute single-take of Russian Ark (2002).
The plot to director Pinkaew's audacious follow-up to Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior plays kind of like Free Willy with elephants.
He also has two memorable encounters, one of them inside a burning Buddhist temple, with an Australian behemoth named Nathan Jones , who's becoming international cinema's go-to large man (he played the giant Brad Pitt's Achilles defeated in the opening scene of Troy).
There's an uninterrupted four minute fight sequence where Jaa fights his way up a spirally four story concourse and a battle with an intimidating Capoeira Fighter (Lateef Crowder) and Australian giant (strongman Nathan B. Jones, "Troy") in a Buddhist Temple engulfed in fire and water.
With recent releases like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero , we've come to expect more out of this kind of film, so it's a bit of a challenge to accept these inadequacies as serious filmmaking.
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Ong-bak made it fun to root for the good guys.
Pinkaew and his star, Muay Thai boxer Tony Jaa, made a splash last year with their film "Ong-Bak."
All of Jaa's old cohorts from "Ong-Bak" are back; Prachya Pinkaew returns to the director's chair and choreographer Panna Rittikrai comes with him to continue his tradition of painfully realistic fight scenes and hard-to-believe-it's-real acrobatics.
I can't imagine a more immobile object than an elephant or a more unstoppable force than Tony Jaa, the 30-year-old master of an art called Muay Thai who came to international attention with Ong-bak (made in 2003 and released in the United States last year).
Jaa reteams with "Ong-Bak" director Prachya Pinkaew for this outing, but to greatly diminished effect.