Alright, so I don't know why i chose this as my first movie review. There's a lot to say about this film, because where there are a lot of reasons that I really enjoyed this, there are a few that made me take a step back too. Anyway, here we have a Thai film that came out in '08. So right off the bat, this is one pretty sweet martial arts film, but it's all in Thai, so unless you speak the language you're going to be reading subtitles. To me that's never been a big deal, but I know it bugs some people, But in this film it might not be such a huge deal for you. I'll explain why as I break this review into two parts. One that consists of the actual film, direction, and acting. And the other where I want to talk specifically about the action sequences.
So my beef with this film lies mostly in it's plot. It's kind of weak, and not really a whole lot happens for the first 15- 20 minutes, which isn't too bad, because it's getting the setup out of the way to make room for the action. Basically the film revolves around this girl who has pretty severe autism, but with that she also has some kind of of savant like martial arts capabilities. There were a few things that kind of bugged me about this idea. I don't really know why they chose to go with this story, when it would have worked just as well if they hadn't used the gimmicky story, but what evs. So she has the ability to pick up on martial arts moves as she sees them. That's fine to me, I've seen this a few times before, so it works for me as an ability. Like a more grounded believable version of Taskmaster or that girl in season 2 of Heroes. But my beef with this is that I'm not sure that even if someone was able to mimic these moves perfectly I'm not sure that they'd know the perfect timing, especially if they had autism. Not only that, but footing is something that doesn't even factor in. If she's autistic how does she know how to keep her footing and how to do all these acrobatic moves and shit. I mean sure she could mimic them, but what if the ground is more slick than when she saw the move used? There's even once where she pulls her pants up a tiny bit, which is totally common if you're in a fight, but i'm not sure someone with as severe a grade of autism as she has would know that that would get in the way of her moves. It wasn't a big deal, just something i noticed and chuckled at the 2 or 3 times it happened throughout the film. The main character's acting is pretty good. She goes from playing this character that I didn't doubt once was autistic, and instantly flipped to a bad as shit, ass kicking machine. Everyone else it was kind of hard to tell. Again the film wasn't in English, so i can never tell how much of the cheesyness is poor acting or just inflection.
So while you have a kind of weak platform to base these action sequences around, they really made the most of them. I'm not sure if the director and the action director were the same person or what, but it's almost like a different film when they go into kick ass mode. There's little to no wire work, and it's all realistic acrobatics, with what appears to the untrained eye, mine, pretty awesome martial arts. I mean just when you think they can't get more imaginative with these set pieces they keep doing things to one up themselves. I mean the first action sequence, twenty minutes in, was awesome, and everyone after that was better and better. I will say though, there's one scene where this random dude walks out to fight the main character and he appears to have turrets and he fights a lot like Voldo from Soul Calibur or something. It was a cool fight but if you think about it for more than 30 seconds it's a little fucked up that these two gangs are having two handicapped people do their fighting for them... Then right after that one dude just pulls out a gun and kills as many guys as he can with that one clip, and then switches over to a katana for an all out sword duel. I loled. This is followed up by a platforming/fighting combo scene that involves a building, a monorail, and signs extending from the building between them. I mean this is so inventive and awesome to watch, it kind of makes me wonder why we haven't seen something like it coming out of Hollywood for films like Prince of Persia, or a Mario adaptation, where it actually makes more sense. My only problem with this scene is that it's the final action set piece, and it doesn't really feel like it. It almost felt like the last two major fights should have been switched. Both scenes are none the less awesome, but it was just a bit weird as a last set.
Now my point from before is that if you're watching this movie, you're really watching it for the action, so there's not really a lot of reading when there is, and during the action there's next to no dialogue, so you can sit back and enjoy the show without having to read at all. I enjoyed the shit out of this film, and I plan on buying it for my collection to throw on for background noise so that when I see the action scenes I can stop and watch them, and walk away during the boring parts. If you like what you see, and want to check this film out for yourself, you can Search Amazon.com for Chocolate, or you can just click the box below.
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