Last night I completed my little Tony Jaa project, and I realized one mildly disappointing thing: I should have done them in chronological order. The problem with The Protector not being available on Netflix Instant meant I had to wait forfuckingever for the goddamn postal service to bring it to me, thus leaving it as the capstone of my Jaa-capades.
Only problem with that is that The Protector isn't very good. It's kind of like an attempt to recapture the bugfuck energy of Ong-Bak, utilizing a similar fish-out-of-water premise where the good kid from the sticks (Tony) goes to the big city and has to fight a bunch of gangsters again, only this time IN A SURPRISE TWIST he goes to Sydney, Australia instead of Bangkok. Fresh!
The fact that The Protector doesn't make more out of the fact that one of the world's top 5 craziest motherfuckers (Tony Jaa) is running around kicking ass in Australia, home of at least three of the other four—it just has to be, it's Australia—is a bit of a let-down. The fight scenes are extremely hot stuff, as they damn near have to be, with Tony Jaa involved, though the intervening story is giggle-inducing horseshit. Or, more accurately, elephant shit.
Yes, this is the movie whose alternate American title is Where's My Goddamn Elephant?: One Man's Pugilistic Quest To Find a Lost Pachyderm. Tony plays a guy in a long line of monks or something who train in Muay Thai to protect battle elephants, and there are a whole lot of stupid-looking CG flashback/dream sequences to back in the days when tiny little Thai motherfuckers would protect the elephants by owning anyone who tries to get up under the elephants where they're vulnerable. Even though the elephants are no longer used for battle anymore, Tony's still all trained and everything. Then one day, a bunch of bad guys who seemingly are involved in every single illegal activity there is—murder, drugs, prostitution, kidnapping animals on the endangered species list—straight up gank Tony's sacred elephant, and the little baby one. Tony beats the shit out of everyone and is told that the bad guys have amscrayed to Australia with the elephants.
Tony shows up in Australia and starts barging up to everyone in sight, beating the shit out of them, and asking them where his elephants are. In so doing, he runs into a Vietnamese gang lieutenant who fucks Tony up with wushu (which I guess he's never seen before or something), that lieutenant's boss, a Chinese trans woman who—in the American cut—never has anyone remark, rudely or otherwise about the fact that she was blatantly not born female (in the original cut, they do acknowledge this). Xing Jin, the actress who plays the role, is trans in real life, and one of the only trans people the Chinese government is willing to acknowledge, because she's apparently an awesome ballet dancer, so, far out. Not a whole lot of those moves are on display in The Protector, though, and one gets the distinct feeling that a whole lot of her scenes were cut due to Harvey Weinstein being a pussy about action fans not being able to get down with LGBT stuff.
I'd rant a little more about Harvey except why fucking bother at this point, and also the movie really isn't all that good. It does, however, have one all-time fucking legendary sequence, and fortunately it's on Youtube, so you don't have to watch the whole movie to see it:
That's right. The first four fucking minutes of that clip was one fucking shot. I sure hope those stunt dudes who went flying four stories into wooden roofs are okay . . .
Then toward the end there's another sequence which is kind of awesome, except more in an unintentional comedy way than the staircase one which is completely and inarguably awesome independent of how dumb the rest of the movie is. And, because this fight is just straight-up ridiculous, it actually fits a little better with the rest of the movie:
This is basically the climactic fight (SPOILER ALERT: the bad guys killed the big elephant, that's what Tony's so pissed about; the baby elephant's ok, though). Tony goes on to have a fight with a gigantic white guy, and then there are multiple gigantic white guys, then he yanks the trans villainess out of a helicopter in a cruddy-looking CGI shot and then the fuckin movie mercifully ends.
But, back to the staircase fight, with the uninterrupted four-minute Steadicam shot of Tony owning the shit of everybody (and getting visibly tired by the end of it, which, hey, he's allowed to). This is the most important part of this picture for two reasons: one, it's awesome, and two, it comes at the halfway point of the movie, which is in itself a major flaw and a sign that the creative talent behind The Protector didn't really know what the fuck they were doing on this one. When one random fight in the middle of the movie is so exponentially cooler than anything else in the movie, it's a sign that either the movie doesn't know what it's doing, or doesn't give a fuck.
I'd be inclined to posit that the answer lies somewhere in between in the case of The Protector. It's flawed and dumb and the acting parts are just fucking staggeringly stupid in places (and killing the big elephant was stupid and unnecessarily melodramatic), but it gets style points for eccentricity (the fact that they're just like, sure, our villain is a trans woman, and sure, she's fucking the corrupt Australian cop dude who kills people for her, not to mention all the goofiness with the elephants) and any movie with Tony Jaa beating the shit out of people is watchable for those scenes alone, though in the case of The Protector, you want to keep your fast-forward button handy.
I now feel like I'm up to speed with Tony Jaa. Like I was saying in my previous post about him, I think he's a total singularity in the history of action movies, and is amazing to watch. But holy fuckin shit he's weird. Don't get me wrong, I like weird. But there's civilian weird and then there's Tony Jaa weird, way the fuck over there in a whole separate category. And if you go over there, don't mess with his elephant, because it'll be all day getting Tony Jaa's foot out from being embedded in your ass.
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