Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
Actors perform in a scene from the movie 'The Protector'. - Contributed
The Protector is a flick that is very big on action. The fight scenes are fast-paced, fantastically fun and stuffed to the hilt with awesome fight choreography. As such, The Protector proves to be fantastic fun. That is, assuming you do not mind that the plot has holes large enough for watermelons to pass through.
The film is directed by Prachya Pinkaew and written by Napalee, Piyaros Thongdee, Joe Wannapin, and Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. The Protector is the story of Kham (played by Tony Jaa). Kham grew up in the tradition of a man who ventures to Australia to find the fiends who stole his elephants and killed his father.
In Australia Kham teams up with renegade police officer Mark (Petchtai Wongkamlao) His journey takes him through a boat chase, and many, many, many, many, many, many fights as he seeks justice and attempts to honour his tradition as a protector.
Kham is not one of those men who is fond of words, so he doesn't speak much. However, his arms and legs are very eloquent and they tend to get his point across with nothing lost in translation, especially as he only speaks three words, snap, crack and crunch. Indeed, by the final fight scene, The Protector has more crunch to it than a marathon cereal eating contest.
Beyond the fighting captured, The Protector is largely visually unimpressive, until it nears the end. Kham and an un-named capoeira fighter (Lateef Crowder) engage in beautiful battle which dabbles in slow motion and allows the movement of their bodies and the water they battle in to linger lovingly on the screen. The scene is so good, it almost seems to belong to a different movie and it raises the overall level of the quality of the direction involved in the flick.
The one thing that The Protector has is unlimited supply in fight scenes. The Protector is one of those flicks where the 'bad guys' keep pouring from the woodwork like termites on speed providing the hero with a never ending stream of arms to twist and heads to break.
The fighting style differs significantly from that which dominates most of the martial arts films that get to this side of the world. Indeed, films that feature the Thai are a rarity and though string work now dominates, very little, if any at all is evident in The Protector and Jaa's gracefully fierce movement should resonate well with those who like their films with lots of kick to it (literally of course).
In many ways, The Protector is your standard (or rather the old standard) martial arts film where a young man goes to seek vengeance for wrongs done to his family or master. In Kham's case the wrong has been committed against both and so he finds himself doing battle against a huge crime syndicate led by the deadly Madame Rose (Xing Jing) and her head henchman Johnny (played by the very handsome Johnny Nguyen).
So, at the end of the reel, if a great fight is what you are looking for, then The Protector is the right ticket to hit that spot.
The Protector is one of those flicks where the 'bad guys' keep pouring from the woodwork like termites on speed providing the hero with a never ending stream of arms to twist and heads to break.
