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Reviews
Serbuan maut (2011)
Overrated
I rented this expecting a movie with a lot of fight scenes and little story. What I saw was a lot of fight scenes and practically no story. Good guy, goatee guy, and grey haired guy go in a building to fight many, many bad guys and an end boss. A decade ago this may have been alright, but these days we can go onto YouTube and see fights like this for free.
Since this movie is all action, I have to say that from a technical standpoint it is very good. There's no wires, no CGI, no shaky "Can't tell what the hell is going on" camera work, no quick cutting, and no speeding up of the action in post production. The action is sometimes inventive and the combatants are very good and very fast. There is a particularly exciting action scene early in the movie involving an axe.
But the action is non-stop - meaning I wanted it to stop but it didn't. Everyone appears to practice the exact same style of martial arts - its not like Tony Jaa films where you can see the different art forms. The main characters survive dozens upon dozens of kicks and punches to the head, and afterwards it's like nothing happened to them. And the action is sometimes quite gruesome, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your taste.
Overall I was disappointed with the movie, and I'm surprised the movie received such a high amount of praise.
Ong-bak 3 (2010)
Garbage
I registered onto IMDb just so I can tell you that this is the worst martial arts movie I've ever seen. I saw and enjoyed both the other movies. I had low expectations for this one, and they weren't met. In fact, the movie made me angry. The story seems to have been written by a random word generator - it involves nonsensical curses, a king who has unintentionally funny hallucinations, a crow woman who sounds like a female transformer, and things that happen that didn't really happen. I tried to understand what was going on, and I did not succeed.
There's also scenes of graphic violence and torture that is a lot more mean spirited than what we've seen in Tony Jaa's other movies. This isn't fun, and it's not like the movie has any deeper meaning or interesting characters to justify it. Do we really need to see an uninterrupted shot of a person's throat being slit open and blood spewing out? How about two?
The fight scenes? There's only one or two long ones, late in the movie, and that's when I perked up. Unfortunately, they're a disappointment. They're obviously sped up and sometimes there are wires involved. The moves Jaa does are the same ones he does in all his movies, except not as good and sometimes obviously choreographed. As expected, everyone attacks one at a time, but this time you can see them standing in the background waiting their turn. Tony Jaa's gotta make some better choices - the guys career has been going downhill after his first movie. The guy's got talent but it's being completely wasted.