Tai (Preeti Barameeanat) is released from jail, all charges dropped, his brother Tan (also played by Barameeanat) having greased some palms with cash earned playing the violent street sport Fireball. After Tai arrives home to discover his brother in a coma, badly bruised and beaten, he enters the Fireball arena to try and find the person responsible, while earning some cash to pay for a much-needed operation.
Thai martial arts movie Fireball (AKA Muay Thai Dunk) revolves around an illegal tournament in which two teams of five men battle it out on a basketball court, maiming and killing their opponents while trying to score a single basket. As such, I wasn't expecting much in the way of a gripping (or logical) storyline—and I didn't get one. I was, however, expecting some decent fight scenes—a bit of bone crunching, adrenaline fuelled action, as the quote on the DVD cover promised—but I didn't get that either.
Director Thanakorn Pongsuwan seems to have gone out of his way to reduce every potentially exciting scene to an incomprehensible mess through the use of wobbly camera-work and rapid editing. There are several lengthy Fireball matches, but it is virtually impossible to work out who is punching or kicking who, making the film an extremely frustrating (and utterly boring) experience. In between the 'action', Pongsuwan pads out the running time with cloying emotional drama, but since I couldn't care less about any of his horribly clichéd characters, this did nothing to help improve my opinion of the film as a whole.
So bad it makes the barely above average Kung Fu Dunk (2008) look like a work of pure genius by comparison, I have no reservations in giving Fireball the lowest possible rating of 1/10.
Thai martial arts movie Fireball (AKA Muay Thai Dunk) revolves around an illegal tournament in which two teams of five men battle it out on a basketball court, maiming and killing their opponents while trying to score a single basket. As such, I wasn't expecting much in the way of a gripping (or logical) storyline—and I didn't get one. I was, however, expecting some decent fight scenes—a bit of bone crunching, adrenaline fuelled action, as the quote on the DVD cover promised—but I didn't get that either.
Director Thanakorn Pongsuwan seems to have gone out of his way to reduce every potentially exciting scene to an incomprehensible mess through the use of wobbly camera-work and rapid editing. There are several lengthy Fireball matches, but it is virtually impossible to work out who is punching or kicking who, making the film an extremely frustrating (and utterly boring) experience. In between the 'action', Pongsuwan pads out the running time with cloying emotional drama, but since I couldn't care less about any of his horribly clichéd characters, this did nothing to help improve my opinion of the film as a whole.
So bad it makes the barely above average Kung Fu Dunk (2008) look like a work of pure genius by comparison, I have no reservations in giving Fireball the lowest possible rating of 1/10.