Reviewed by Aaron Yap

IF Ong-Bak restored the pain factor in the martial arts genre, highlighting every second of agony in all its blood-drenched, bone-crunching, skin-perforating glory, Born to Fight restores, for lack of a better phrase, the death factor in the action genre in general.


Writer/director Panna Rittikrai, who wrote and choreographed Ong-Bak, has stitched together a film which features stunts of such go-for-broke recklessness, it goes beyond being just a homage to those stunt-mad '80s Jackie Chan flicks, but specifically the end credits of those films – those behind-the-scenes glimpses where we see the results of Jackie failing a stunt, being carried away in a stretcher, or the crew rushing in to survey the damage, if any. There are moments here that approach near-snuff shades of close-call death it becomes both highly disturbing, and disturbingly thrilling, to watch – perhaps the only reason the film is able to transcend its thoroughly generic veneer.

The plot is a laughable exercise in narrative inanities, mostly cribbed from Die Hard. For his cast, Rittikrai assembled a team of real-life athletes – rationalising that it's easier to train athletes to act than vice versa – to play athletes who visit a rural village to provide some charity work. Along for the ride is an undercover cop (Choupong Changprung, who isn't quite Tony Jaa) who's just lost his partner in a operation to nab crime boss General Yang. Soon enough they're besieged by a militant group demanding from the government the release of Yang. Failure to do so would result in a nuclear missile being launched into Bangkok – news of which the Thai Prime Minister receives in an assembly hall with laptops that have been hacked to receive live video feed of the village's hostage situation! Not content to sit back and let their captors terrorise them, the villagers decide to band together and fight back.

One might argue that its failures in storytelling is actually an asset, the premise merely a clothesline to hang astonishing set-pieces on, but without the guiding force of a discernible character or star, the film weakens into something even less than a movie. It definitely lacks the solid, well-oiled construction of Ong-Bak (disregarding that film's flaws), and more significantly the attraction of Tony Jaa. Born To Fight is the scraggier, messier cousin who wants to hog attention at every turn, headstrong and passionate but much less skillful and eloquent.

Furthermore, the charges of overt, blatant nationalism against the film are not unfounded. Truth be told, it's no more jingoistic than any fist-pumping Michael Bay film. We see a man running, screaming, in slow-motion to rescue a toppling flag, and it's the national anthem on the radio that gives the villagers the inspirational thrust they need to overthrow their captors. Whereas Ong-Bak's spiritual Buddhist element struck a more universal chord, Born To Fight's martyrist agenda is less palatable, or at least well-integrated, especially for a film that boils down to fundamentally empty, violent spectacle.

Having said all that, I'd be lying if I said the film didn't deliver on some visceral level. From the Police Story-quoting opening scene where a flaming truck decimates an entire shanty town to its high body count finish, Rittikrai builds the film around a simple equation of 20% exposition, 80% action. Barreling along at a frenzied pace, hilariously pulsating techno beat on the soundtrack, and played with a straight, near-funereal face, Born To Fight is unapologetically wall-to-wall mayhem, with so many things constantly blowing up, people being shot at, bodies ricocheting off hard surfaces and bones snapping all over the show, the clutter of action sequences towards the end is actually numbing.

Martial arts purists might scoff at the lack of sustained sparring. While there are displays of Muay Thai, of the elbow-to-the-head variety, Born To Fight isn't a full-blown martial arts film. There's probably just as much application of gymnastics, with the athletes flinging themselves into the air with a graceful, but professional abandon and inventively using pommel horses to fight their assailants. It's disappointing though, that Rittikrai didn't spend more time investing in their personalities. They're solely defined by technique (i.e. the dude whose specialty is kicking wooden Thai soccer balls with laser-guided precision), and as such, their physical performances sometimes suffer from a perfunctory blandness, especially when some of the Muay Thai choreography starts looking a tad repetitive and over-used (nothing here tops Jaa's achievements in Ong-Bak).

Where the film really hits its stride are those wildly insane stunts – unassisted by mats, wires or CGI – that would make Hollywood stuntmen wince and drop their jaws (and balls). Once seen, it's really hard to forget the shot of the guy who falls in-between two moving semis, his head within inches being crushed by the wheels. And with crazy moments like the little girl who gets chucked a few metres into the air (then subsequently kicks her attacker's ass), and the one-legged man on crutches leaping elegantly to spin a kick, Born To Fight certainly isn't afraid to embrace the freakshow-fascination of shock reality programming – think everything from America's Funniest Home Videos to Faces of Death – to go with its gritty '80s Hong Kong action throwback sensibility.