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bout to go all angry rant here
The Protector 2 - 0/10
What the fuck has happened to Tony Jaa and Prachya Pinkaew? It's like this was made by completely different people. The Protector is in my opinion, the best martial arts movie ever made. How did they fuck up the sequel this badly?
The biggest difference is that they are now using wires and CG. Jaa's previous movies were awesome specifically because they DIDN'T use wires or CG. The fights looked real, and felt real, because they were real. But now, everything looks ridiculous and terrible. Especially considering that this was not made by hollywood, but by thailand, so the extensive amount of CG that is here, looks about equal to the mortal kombat movies. That's not an exaggeration. It's that bad.
That would be endurable if the rest of the fighting was good, but it's really not. At all. I don't know if it's because he's older or because of lingering injuries, but Jaa just looks slower here. Some people have said it's because the people working with him weren't good enough and fast enough to keep up with him, so Jaa had to slow down just to get the fight choreography to work. I dunno. All I know is that in the first movie, you barely had time to process the badass shit jaa did, before he did something else amazing. In this movie there were literally only two instances throughout the whole film where I went "Wow that was cool." And one of them was from Jeeja Yanin.
Oh yeah, if you don't know Jeeja Yanin is an amazing female martial artist who exploded onto the kung fu movie scene almost as fast as Tony Jaa. A movie with these two in it is like a modern martial arts dream match. Too bad she spends most of her screen time here getting her ass handed to her, and needing help from big strong men to save her. This is unacceptable. Not even from a sexism standpoint (though it does seem a tad sexist) It's unacceptable because she spends all her time in her other movies BEATING THE LIVING FUCK OUT OF ENTIRE WAVES OF BIG SCARY DUDES. The Jaa/Jeeja team up should of been the best thing ever. Instead she just lies on the ground twitching for most of the movie.
What else, what else....oh yeah plot is terrible. It's terrible because they actually tried to make some complex plot. Martial arts movies don't need complex plots. Look at the first film. Bad guys steal dude's elephant. Dude beats the shit out of everybody til he gets elephant back. That's it. Done. Instead they try and make some big conspiracy plot, and it fails horribly because martial arts movie writers can't write for shit. That's why they're martial arts movie writers.
Obligatory chase scene like in all Tony Jaa movies, except this one is boring, makes no sense, and drags on waaaaaaaaaay past it's welcome.
Finally, the RZA's performance should be shown in acting classes around the world as a lesson how NOT to act. "RRRAAAAAAARRR YOU CAN TELL HOW ANGRY I AM CAUSE MY EYES ARE SO WIDE! RAWWWWRR"
end rant
FUCK
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