User Reviews

It starts off with a great shootout at a reception and you think it's going to be a serious film but it soon develops into an action-comedy and I must admit that despite a few flaws I enjoyed it . The plot is no great shakes but the action was well staged and the comedy was funny with some nice in-jokes.(Tony Jaa!) Petchtai Wongkamlao is fine as the titular bodyguard and is supported by a cast who looked like they were having fun, delivering apt performances to make the film a pleasure to watch. Also in it is as Pok was the delightful Pumwaree Yodkamol and I've always been surprised at the paucity of her filmography. A fun film that gives one a good glow.

The only reason I picked up this film in a market, is that on the front cover it promised 'the return of Tony Jaa'. Having seen Ongbak and warrior king, I saw this is a good thing. Only what I ended up with was a film write, directed and starring Petchtai Wongkamlao, the co-star from the other films.

From the onset of the film, you get the impression that the film may be a decent action flick, with all the slow motion, dressed in black leather, gun fights aplenty. However this soon cools off, very soon, and you end up with the main star not talking for the first 22 minutes, gun fight scenes occurring with all the action being off-screen (yes I mean people getting shot without any real action) and jokes which really are not funny.

A major half of the film contains now action and is mainly about Wong Koms association with Pok, which to be honest I couldn't be bothered to watch and skipped to the end (I was getting that fed up with the film).

At the end where you expect a huge fight, what you end up with is the main guy getting beat up for 15 minutes, showing absolutely no fighting skill, and yet some how each person he's fighting ends up defeating themselves in some foolish way. This is stupid, is not funny and in the end I was rooting for the bad guys as the lead character was really annoying me.

The film was 95 minutes long, and yet I want 93 minutes back. Why? Because during the film, Tony Jaa appears for about 2 minutes and actually does some martial arts (very very well!). What a mis-sell! This film should have been done by having Tony Jaa in the lead role, and Petchtai Wongkamlao taking Tony Jaas, that way he probably would have been killed early on and there would have been a decent number of fight scenes at the end.

This is not a martial arts film, it is not a comedy, it is 2 minutes of good film hidden within 93 minutes of film that makes Chuck Norris look good.

I gave this a 2, which would have been 1 of Tony Jaa hadn't appeared.

This Thai comedy features that county's biggest stand-up comedian, Petchtai Wongkamlao, as a bodyguard who gets embroiled in a war between his employer and a rival businessman. Now, Wongkamlao will be familiar to most Western audiences as the bald sidekick in ONG BAK and the policeman in WARRIOR KING, and here he attempts to reinvent himself as his country's answer to Jackie Chan. While a lot of the surreal humour evident from Jackie's films is evident, and there's a Chan-style chase scene where a butt-naked Wongkamlao is chased through the streets by a gang of gun-toting thugs (just like in THE ACCIDENTAL SPY), Wongkamlao is never going to be success in the West because the humour is just too far out here! Many of the jokes require knowledge of Thai culture and customs and as such they fall flat, and to make matters worse there is a monotonous sub-plot involving the lives of the poor which really drags the movie down.

The comedy is so broad and unusual that you'll be wondering what on earth you're watching. Humour comes from a bad guy henchman with Down's Syndrome and another henchman who keeps wearing the wrong clothes to work and misunderstanding his boss – that's a joke that is repeated about ten to twenty times throughout the entire film. While Wongkamlao does his best to keep up with the humour, he underplays his role and that sits oddly with some of the supposed comedy scenes. Bits involving the supporting cast are entirely dull and the romantic subplot with ONG BAK's Pumwaree Yodkamol only serves to reinforce my impression that she's an utterly annoying actress.

The film is bookended by a couple of decent scenes. The first is a shoot-out in a restaurant which is so over-the-top that it absolutely kicks ass; wirework is used in abundance as Wongkamlao flips, shoots and flies across tables, gunning down the bad guys as he does so. Meanwhile, the film's climax is set in a warehouse, as our eponymous hero battles various bad guys one at a time. There's a Thai boxer, the aforementioned Down's Syndrome guy (who turns out to be super-tough) and a period-set fighter. The comedy here is broad, and cheesy, recalling the type of humour in the SCARY MOVIE series, but at least it's more acceptable and understandable than that found elsewhere. The bit where a naked Wongkamlao has his butt squirted with a water pistol seems to go on for an age and makes for uncomfortable, incomprehensible viewing.

However, the film does throw in some references to other movies which are fun if you're in the know. There's a mad homeless man who keeps saying that Bang Rajan is about to fall, an amusing reference to the ultra-successful Thai historical epic BANG RAJAN which was released in 2000. One fighter at the film's climax adopts Jet Li's style from ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA, complete with blatant wirework and OUATIC's theme tune playing over the action, which is very funny indeed. However the best part of the film for most Western audiences will be Tony Jaa's cameo; he plays a supermarket fighter who gets to kick some ass in a few (very quick) fight scenes. Passing Wongkamlao as he leaves, he calls the actor 'Humlae' – Wongkamlao's name in ONG BAK. Wongkamlao's response? "Wrong film, dickhead!". Unfortunately these genuinely funny moments come few and far between and the film as a whole drags, with the whole everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to the comedy quickly becoming tiring.