The Protector

Tony Jaa's performance in Ong Bak has been carefully replicated in all of the broadest details of The Protector. As a simple country hick, he has to avenge stolen valuables by traveling to the big city. But the film is so keen to charge off in several directions at once that Jaa seems to have almost become an afterthought.

The basic plot comes close to being an outright spoof, as Jaa murders bad guys and innocent bystanders alike in pursuit of his elephant, which was snatched by Australian thieves. Past the first 15 minutes of slow-mo pachyderms, the film is composed entirely of fights across Sydney, with a higher baddie count than the entire Death Wish series. A new major enemy turns up at least every 10 minutes; human colossus T.K. (Nathan Jones) and dominatrix gangster Madame Rose (Xing Jing) provide interesting feet fodder. Amidst the vast array of corrupt cops on Segways and henchmen on rollerskates, though, it�s difficult to pick them out.

Indeed, the redeeming features of the film are packed away in three isolated five-star fight scenes that deserve better than their surrounding padding. A fight up five floors of circular stairways in one continual camera shot beats anything out of Kill Bill just by its sheer scale. A later bone-shattering onslaught, meanwhile, is Xeroxed straight out of the end of Volume 1, and the final payoff scene creates a pace that is so desperately missing elsewhere. Yet various sub-plots wander in like remnants of other films -- whilst any plot point will inevitably be arranged around excuses to show off Jaa�s prowess, it�s all so episodically disjointed that it feels a little too much like a video game, even for the genre. Wait for the decent scenes to turn up on Youtube; the rest is pure filler.