Twinkle-toed Thai martial artist Tony Jaa plays Ting, a pious villager trained in the Thai martial art tradition of Muay Thai. When Bangkok thieves steal the head of the village’s Buddhist statue (the titular “Ong Bak”), Ting embarks to the capital city to retrieve the icon, trading twirling punches and kicks with vicious gangsters along the way.
Although the film may be considered something of a disappointment due to an annoying, self-serving narcissism and overkill visual flamboyance (most of the action sequences play in gratuitous slow motion, often replaying Jaa’s martial acrobatics in various camera angles and distracting MTV-style jagged cuts), Fox’s region-one NTSC DVD release offers up a mostly satisfying presentation. The anamorphic 1.85:1 image is sharp and mostly damage-free, reproducing the sun-splashed amber hues of the Bangkok photography without any chroma noise and only mild edge enhancement.
Darker scenes fare slightly worse, tending to appear murky and undetailed. Thankfully Fox has retained the Dolby Digital Thai soundtrack (presented in 5.1 surround), which makes good use of the surrounds for ambient noises (birds chirping, engines revving), instead of remixing it to include distractingly artificial sound effects. More problematic are the English subtitles, which inexplicably add closed-captioning cues (“birds chirping,” “man groaning”) to the subtitles. Although the subtitles are excellent, the closed captioning quickly grows tiresome, sometimes featuring useless cues such as “Thai language” or “inaudible” instead of subtitles!
An English 2.0 Dolby Digital surround track and Spanish subtitles are also included. It should be noted that this DVD release features the shorter “Luc Besson” cut (named after the French director who helped distribute and recut the film for foreign release), which inserts some French rap into the soundtrack and omits some of the more graphic bone-breaking shots, as well as most of the subplot involving Ngek (Rungrawee Borrijindakul), a drug-addicted Bangkok gangster. Those interested in seeing the film in its original form should seek out the Australian two-disc region-free PAL release, which offers both the Besson cut and the longer Thai original.
The extra features mostly consist of the expected promo materials, such as six trailers (U.S. teaser and theatrical trailers, Thai teaser and theatrical trailers, and French teaser and theatrical trailers), a music video, a “selected B-roll” (behind-the-scenes) segment of three scenes in the film (the taxi chase, the “flaming legs” sequence, and the arena fight), and a “making of” featurette on the music video. None of these features are particularly interesting, mostly consisting of cast and crew chest-puffing and, in the case of the music video, inane French rapping set to shots of Jaa bouncing around in a boxing ring. More exotic, but no more intriguing, is a short promo for the film featuring The Wu Tang Clan’s RZA, in which the self-absorbed rapper spouts hip-hop pap set to clips from the film.
Rounding out the extras is a “live performance” (2 minutes, 32 seconds) by Jaa featuring the performer demonstrating his unique brand of martial art to a raucous audience, and “the eight movements of Muay Thai,” a short (1 minute, 40 seconds) showcase of the eight main attacks of Muay Thai.
