Chocolate

Rating: NC-16 (Violence)
Running time: 93 minutes
Opens: 15 May 2008, Now Showing

Some info:
1) Wiki
2) IMDB Profile
3) Official Site (Thai with English menu names)

Another thai martial arts film, like those by Tony Jaa, but this time it’s a young gal (though she’s in fact older than me) instead. As you might have guessed, the story isn’t very much, though I think they tried to improve liao (based on what I can remember for Tom Yum Goong). At least the starting looks as though they were trying to lay the foundation works for a proper story but in the end it still becomes very much a “go to place A, show off ur leet martial skills, go to next place. repeat until final boss cleared”.

In fact, the wiki article has more or less summarised the story, just that the production team put in more effort to show the scenarios of the first 3 paragraphs of the wiki summary. Yeah, so you can expect next to 0 action packed goodness during the beginning.

Yup, so when the lead star finally goes around collecting back her mom’s money from various shady people, she gets into fights and more fights, until she meets the boss. Haha, yeah now you can see a lot of nice choreographed action scenes.

Well, the highlight of the show is seeing this gal doing all those stunts and nice action sequences, and of course you’ll get a good share of it in this hour and half movie. It’s quite evident that while filming to finish 1 area of battles, they need many, many takes, perhaps every short, short sequence is a take itself. At least the continuity seems pretty good though on many occasions I could tell it’s actually continued from a different take. Oh well, some of those are really gonna be hard to get it in 1 take, so requiring editing for continuity isn’t much of a surprise. After all, during the early parts of the credits, we get to see some behind the scenes mishaps and accidents + injuries. Those look really painful though. Being stuntmen for this show is no joke.

Oh yah, during the early parts of the show, there’s many scenes of Tony Jaa’s movies being shown as the main lead is viewing such films to learn more martial arts moves or something. Haha, what a way to advertise huh. =X Hmm, and also during the parts in which they speak English, it really took me quite some effort to get what they were talking without focusing too much on the subtitles, and some parts don’t even have subtitles cos I think they presume it’s clear enough to do without the English subs. Bleah.

The nice action scenes make up for the less than average plot. My take: 6/10