Chocolate

Muay Thai (kick boxing) martial arts movies, akin to Hong Kong's kung fu spectacles, gained wider international attention in 2003 through Ong-Bak, The Thai Warrior, co-written and directed by Prachya Pinkaew, starring Tony Jaa. The two men went to Australia for The Protector (2005), whose lead writer was the single-named Napalee. A sequel of it is in production by them, after Jaa had worked with Panna Rittikrai on two Ong-Bak sequels. Panna, who'd also co-written the original story, and is an experienced stuntman, became Jaa's co-director.

In the meantime, Prachya groomed a young female taekwondo fighter to learn kick-boxing moves for the lead role in a 2008 feature, Chocolate. It was co-written by Napalee and director Chukiat (The Love of Siam) Sakveerakul. Their ingenue lead actress, Yanin Vismitananda (now aka JeeJa), was made to look good by the film's action choreographer - who was Panna, not too surprisingly in the close-knit world of Thai action movies.

JeeJa is certainly prettier to look at than Jacky Chan, but the movie's stunts are not as complex as his, nor as much gory fun as Kill Bill's. In order, probably, to minimise novice JeeJa's acting weaknesses, her character is the autistic daughter of a Thai gangster's moll, who left him to marry a Bangkok-based Yakusa chieftain (workaholic ex-model Hiroshi Abe). Faced with death threats from the mobster, she tells the Japanese to leave the country for ever and later discovers she's pregnant.

Several years later, a bullied chubby young boy is given a home by the moll, who works as a cashier for a Japanese restaurant. That key plot development takes only a few seconds of unexplained screen time, whose meaning is left to a movie-goer's instinctive understanding that such a character must emerge in the genre. So must the gangster's bevy of lady-boy hitmen, inspirational kick-boxers on B&W TV and an adjacent school, and an epileptic be-spectacled spindly teenage boy who must eventually challenge the autistic girl. And let's not ignore a gaggle of female boxers and gang of sword-wielding hoodlums who appear from nowhere in the final multi-sequenced battle. It pitches the girl and her terminally ill mum and badly-wounded Japanese dad against the minions of a mortally-wounded Thai villain who takes a very long time, and lots of falls, before dying.

Scores of stuntmen also appear in order to be foot-kicked, tossed and tumbled into cringing submission or grisly death in neatly-choreographed set-pieces fought single-handedly by the girl, abetted meekly by her chubby pal. They had decided to collect money owed to the mother from her gangster days, in order to pay for her worsening cancer's treatment, leading them to wage martial justice in the photogenic settings of an ice factory, candy depot, Japanese-style mansion, and, most memorably, on the wall and neon signs of a four-storey building facing a sky-train elevated railway in the finale. Yep, there's not much time for character development in this genre.

Where's the "Chocolate"? My instincts led me to guess that the girl's passion for Smartie-like chocolate-coated candy balls is somehow fundamental to the story, but there was no clear, or even sly, sign that the sweets gave the supergirl the necessary sugar rush or brain buzz to overcome her autism and standard stilted movements. I suspected instead that there were various deleted scenes that provided a fuller chocolate-filled narrative, and they were cut so that audiences could be rushed through the childhood period and into the action scenes.