Features > Movie Reviews > Ong-Bak…

His name is Tony Jaa, and he's the real deal. That's the pitch anyway. I bet it wasn't advertised in Thailand this way, but in the Western world Ong-bak comes with the tag-line: 'No stunt doubles, no computer images, no strings attached'.

No computer images! Here I was thinking CGI is the future of cinema. I've barely seen a movie recently which didn't incorporate computer imagery on some level, whether it's the labyrinthine crypts and cavernous troves of National Treasure, the massed armies of Kingdom of Heaven, the richly imagined cosmology of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith or even the DIY underground shlock of Tarnation.

What sort of spectacle would House of Flying Daggers be without some cosmetic enhancement? As Fast Eddie Felson would say: there's the rub. Ong-bak is being positioned as a reaction against the cinema of spectacle which has come to dominate action films East and West.

In the West, CGI has produced bigger and bigger fireballs, splashier and flashier effects to the point where, in The Matrix Reloaded, Keanu Reeves can fight off 50 cloned adversaries and escape without a scratch.

Meanwhile, in the East, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revitalised the traditional string-work magic of the classic Shaw Brothers kung-fu picture by giving it a new computerised coat of paint. The three Zhang Ziyi pictures which have heralded this return - Crouching Tiger, House of Flying Daggers and Hero - all look fantastic, with their colour-coded costumes, sets and matching sky-lines. The aesthetics are thrilling, but the action has become so elevated (literally in the case of those famous bamboo swordfights) that somebody had to bring it back down to earth.

CGI allows a filmmaker to pretty much get away with murder. Anything is possible. Look at xXx2: The Next Level, how chubby Ice Cube can defy gravity in the least probable prison escape since Robert Blake. Later in the same movie the laws of physics take a holiday when Cube gives chase to a high speed train in his souped up hot rod, even driving up on to the rails (Look ma! No tyres!).

In effect, filmmakers are becoming more like animators. Check out the extras on any recent Robert Rodriguez DVD, you'll see that virtually every shot in his Spy Kids movies is digitallly doctored. With Sin City, he's taken it a stage further, and produced a movie which looks like a comic book. The irony there is that comic books were originally sourced in movies, not the other way round. In fact Sin City resembles nothing so much as a storyboard.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but in the brave new simulated, virtually indestructible CG world nothing seems to carry much weight. Just like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, actions don't have consequences. All hell can break loose, but nobody really gets hurt. And on some level we know it ain't so. Audiences have become very attuned to the lies the camera tells us, and increasingly alienated from all this empty spectacle.

Hence the appeal of Tony Jaa and Ong-bak, a low budget movie from Thailand which offers something that the sophisticated film studios in Hollywood and Hong Kong no longer offer: a taste of reality.

It's not that this film is cinema-verite documentary or even naturalistic, but you can believe that Jaa (a former stunt double) is doing his own stunts, diving through barb wire, leaping under moving trucks, kickboxing with fire. This is spectacular stuff, but it's also physically demanding and dangerous. Somehow that exertion and excitement still communicates more deeply than all the pretty virtual virtuosos the computers keep throwing at us.