Thank Fuck it’s the end...

Ong Bak 3: The Final Battle – Tony Jaa & Panna Rittikrai

Why couldn’t they have just left it at the first Ong Bak, was there any need for two and three, where Jaa just basically takes loads of LSD and drugs and goes on a rampage with a camera and some money, thinking that using elephants all the time is cool, fuck the fact that it’s cruel to animals, it’s fine, they can’t feel it. It’s just sad to see a film franchise crumble as much as this one, truly one of the worst things to happen in cinema since Han shooting first. I really wanted this to succeed but it just couldn’t, after the promise of something bigger and better, we just got crazier and less realistic. We were taken thousands of years into the past about the origins of someone or something and it just didn’t work. The second Ong Bak was okay in parts but overall lacked the heart and soul from the first and most importantly, lacked the directorial skill that was there in bundles before. You can see in this one Jaa was taken full reins of what to do; if i was a studio rep and i was given this, i would literally shit my pants.

Following directly on from the second Ong Bak film, we see Tien, the protagonist who sees himself coming back from death at the end of the last film and seeing him get his revenge on the double twist he received. From here on out, after dying and seemingly coming back to life, Tien goes on a revenge mission meeting random people who want to kill him and leading him to the man who started this all. I’m not going to go into much more detail than that because i can’t be bothered and it’s really not worth your time in knowing about worthless and pointless shit. It’s a fucked up Tony Jaa picture that should really showcase how good he is, but instead it fails in so many levels. I want to see Jaa now take himself to someone with talent and use his skills in the right way, just let him chat to Jackie Chan for a little while and understand that using ELEPHANTS IS STILL FUCKING WRONG!

So the lesson here is, don’t use elephants in your film as a form of padding for the actors and stuntmen to do fights off on to. Seriously, i can’t believe i’m the only one seeing this!

2/10

Simon Childs