Fantastic Fest 2008: Muay Thai Chaiya

For sake of argument I've realized the folly of my ways posting too many titles within one posting. It's not gonna help you out if you're looking for a title. This review was done last week and I am isolating it now.

One of the things that we have been lamenting about Thai action cinema is a clear lack of good story telling. All of the best examples suffer from this greatly. Their only benefit is that the action is so spectacular you can forgive them if the story is there only to act as a string to connect the action sequences and perhaps explain why our hero runs from building to building crushing skulls and yelling a lot. So when a film like Muay Thai Chaiya comes along promising that same great action but also boasts a good story you’re willing to give it a shot.

Muay Thai Chaiya is a film about brotherhood that feels like it was ripped right out of pages of a Hong Kong filmmaking handbook the rules play out very much the same. Three childhood friends move from the country to the big city to attain their hopes and dreams. Eventually things will go right for some, wrong for the others. Our three friends move to the big city, two of them with hopes of fighting in big league stadiums. Eventually they feel the crushing power of corruption within the system, bad choices are made and soon some of them are caught in a world of corruption, crime, illegal street fighting, loose women and substance abuse. It rings so familiar with the heroic bloodshed and brotherhood films from Hong Kong so predominant in the 80s and 90s.

This isn’t so much the problem for Muay Thai Chaiya. The brotherhood theme is a proven theme in film and it is good to see other cultures offer their interpretation of that. My biggest concern about this film was the whole structure of it. Films about brotherhood are meant to be dramatic and MTC certainly has that in spades. It just seems that every moment of their lives portrayed in this film came with this massive moral weight hanging around their necks. Editing is also a concern as the narrative is delivered is short sporadic bursts focusing mostly on one character at a time. When you clock in at a near 2 hours in length that begins to get tedious. Big character moment then fade to black. Big character moment then fade to black. Big character moment… you start to get the idea. You run the risk of losing your audience because these moments are so short and we’re released from empathizing with these guys every time the screen fades to black. The fighting is excellent. MTC has a lot of it and offers a variety of fighting styles from fundamental Muay Thai to dirty and gritty illegal street fighting with swords and sledge hammers. It is often hard hitting and entertaining. The movie on a whole though was hit and miss for me.

Muay Thai Chaiya plays once more on Monday the 22nd.