“‘Chocolate’ stars newcomer Nicharee “Jeeja” Vismistananda as an autistic girl who learns how to fight both by absorbing her martial arts skills from what she sees on TV and from the Muay thai boxing school next to her home. When she finds a list of debtors in her sick mother’s diary, she decides to go collecting. Her quest leads her to confrontations with criminal gangs and also her father, a member of the Japanese mafia.”
[quote=“Angel”]
Hey, that doesn’t look half-bad.
[/quote]
And it succeeds. The story of a autist girl who gets in trouble with the local gangsters and learns martial arts by watching Bruce Lee films on TV isn’t over-written for sure, but the basic idea - having a cute, 22 your old girl beating the shit out of 120 opponents - is fun of course. In your usual Thai style half of the villains appear to be transvestites. There’s also a hilariurs, cgi enhanced slow motion shot of a fly getting electrified. The finale, which is a series of completely insane and incredibly painful looking stunts, sets the genre bar once again a bit higher.
[quote=“Hung Fist”]
The finale, which is a series of completely insane and incredibly painful looking stunts, sets the genre bar once again a bit higher.
[/quote]
OMGOMGOMG. woohoo. I love the new(er) wave of Thai martial arts movies, also those that do not feature Jaa. I will DEFINATELY watch this movie ASAP.
[quote=“Sebastian”]
as long as the movie itself is not as horrible as all those tony jaa movies…
[/quote]
Tony Jaa movies horrible? Wha-haat? Entschuldigen sie mein Herr, ich don’t think so.
EDIT: I just found out that this movie is released in my country TOMORROW. Guess I know the plan for tomorrow already.
[quote=“Crazy Kenneth”]
I love the new(er) wave of Thai martial arts movies, also those that do not feature Jaa. I will DEFINATELY watch this movie ASAP.
[/quote]
Well, it’s not as good as Tom Yum Goong or Tabunfire, but it’s easily better than Born to Fight. Basically the whole film builds for the finale, but it’s good fun with entertaining fights and cute lead, and the payoff really is worth it. Applauses from the audience were well deserved (another round followed after the “accidents footage” in the closing credits)
aside from the fights, the tony jaa movies pretty much all sucked big time. horrible story, non-existant acting and in the protector, all this bone crunching got really really boring after a while… no thanks… he’s not bruce lee
I never really understood the complaints about Tom Yum Goong. The script is fine. Tony loses his elephant and he must go to Australia to get it back! It’s brilliant. The film moves like a bullet train. Would it be any better if there was some pretentious cliche collection storyline with “real drama” to slow it down?
Same as Rambo. It was masterfully put together. Any extra minutes would probably only have weakened it.
I absolutely loved Chocolate, really a fantastic film. I wrote my review a while back, I don’t know if I liked it more than Ong-Bak but I did actually enjoy it more than Tom Yum Goong.
