The plot is pretty much irrelevant, but it does a reasonable job moving the main character around to let him kick ass in a variety of locations and against a lot of different people. Tony Jaa is the main character, and he plays a country boy from a small town. When an asshole comes from the big city and ends up cutting the head off of their local Buddha statue the old people of the town think it will be their doom unless someone can bring the head back. So Tony sets off to get it, in what is obviously his character's first trip out of the country.  He seems very unimpressed by the big city, but of course he does the usual naive stuff and gets into fights by accident; fights he wins thanks to his amazing skill at Muy Thai.

To the scores.

Onk Bak: The Thai Warrior
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 7 (fighting 9, other 4)
Humor: 5
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Must See on the Big Screen: 2
Overall: 7

Honestly, this is in no way a film that deserves a 7 score. Objectively, it's about a 4 due to the very low production values, poor lighting, poor camera work, indifferent direction, a stupid story, etc. I'm not reviewing it as a whole film though, since as I said, it's action porn. I don't mean a porn with action, since while it's rated R, that's all for the violence. There's one very brief, slightly sexual scene, but the only nudity is topless muscular guys, and it's not a sexy movie in any way. It's all about the combat, and if you don't love martial arts and fight scenes, you will be very bored and unhappy sitting through this one. The plot isn't horrible, and there is some decent acting, but it's still stuff you sit through waiting for the next fight scene. I'd recommend this one for a DVD buy that you can fast forward through, rather than something you need to pay to see in the theater.

I'm not saying it's a good movie; I'm saying that it's good at what it does, and if you're a fan of this type of film you'll enjoy it. Most other critics are doing the same, judging by the 82% it has on Rotten Tomatoes.

As a side note, the title makes no sense. Onk Bak is a generic term for "Buddha statue" as they use it in the movie, but it's also used as the specific name for the actual beheaded statue from his home village. I assume this is due to the rather janky subtitled translation of the film, but whatever. (Malaya thought the one English character was called "Big Ben" in the audio, but he was "Big Bear" in the subtitles.) The main character is not named Onk Bak, and Onk Bak is not a warrior; it's just a statue. They obviously stuck with "ong bak" since it's a cool sounding phrase with a hint of the exotic, but then to give the uninitiated some idea what the movie was about, they tacked on "The Thai Warrior." But not "The Muay Thai Warrior" since most people don't know that that's a form of martial arts, and it would just generate further confusion.

Some specific categorized comments:

Script/Story: 3
As I said, it's not much of a story. Like in a porno, you don't really care why the two cops came into the bar; you just want them to get down with the hotty bartender. You might sort of care about Tony getting the statue back for his village, but really you just want him to kick ass. And he does.

Acting/Casting: 6
It was better than I expected, though several actors went way overboard in their amateurish fashion. Tony Jaa's character has a friend in the big city who grew up in his village, but has now turned his back on those country roots and is trying to make a living as a grifter in the big city. He's not very good at it.  He becomes a pudgy sidekick though, and takes a lot of pratfalls and gets hit a lot, which is fine with the audience since he's a total asshole early on. There's a skinny girl who tries to help out as well, but she adds nothing and her caterwauling overacting in a moment of grief is physically painful to behold. The evil crime lord is pretty stupid too, since he's cruel and nasty just for the hell of it, and can't really act anyway since he talks through a blowhole with the aid of a cancer kazoo.  The film lacks for a main bad guy with any charisma; the bad guy needed a huge bodyguard that we could have anticipated a final fight with.

Action: 7 (fighting 9, other 4)
To briefly mention the non-fighting action... bleh. There are some good foot chase scenes that aren't really fighting, but mainly I'm talking about a couple of vehicle chases, one of them between about 25 tuk tuks, 3-wheeled taxi things that look cute, but are somewhat hampered by having a top speed of about 20MPH. The movie tried to do cool stuff with them; making them pop wheelies and plummet off a road that was under construction ALA The Blues Brothers, but it was just silly. They were slow, they were crash happy, and the whole segment was 10 minutes too long.

The fighting though, was the bomb. I could do a whole blog on the Muay Thai styles and moves, but basically it's very physical, close, intense hitting with lots of elbows, knees, and tremendous leaping and acrobatics. I'd never seen such good leaping and kicking, with Tony routinely doing double spins with hard accurate kicks at the end, double flips to hits on the ground, leaps off of 10 foot obstacles, etc. It was somewhat reminiscent of the Brazilian Capioperia style you might have seen, but in this movie the double flips and spins and such looked useful and powerful. It wasn't just amateur gymnastics thrown randomly into a fight scene, where it was quite obvious that the leaping did nothing to help the fighters fight, as is often the case when martial arts movies get tumble-happy. Tony's leaping and spinning and kicking was incredibly athletic and difficult and it looked effective. It's all real too, since one of the selling points of Ong Bak is that they did not do it with ropes and wires and high tech bullshit; just hardcore stunt men in Thailand with very little to lose. I'm sure numerous people were injured in the course of filming this one, and their dedication and sacrifice shows on screen.

In addition to the very good barehanded stuff, they use some weapons, staves, sticks, clubs, etc, though nothing with a blade or there would have been fatalities, as hard as they were hitting each other. And they were hitting; this wasn't a Hollywood production with no contact; fists, feet, and elbows were meeting bodies and skulls with great force.  I guarantee you several stunt guys got concussions. The weapon work wasn't very expert, to my semi-trained eye, but it was provided some variety to the bare handed fighting, and the whole Muay Thai style is very different than the Chinese/Japanese martial arts you see in most films, so seeing all the knee hitting, leaping and elbowing to the back of the head, etc was a nice change from Jet Li and Jackie Chan and the Wuxia films.

Humor: 5
Surprisingly, there was a good amount of humor. None of it with dialogue, but lots with action, mostly as the pudgy sidekick crashed into things and Tony did his amazing leaps and slides and escapes. A nice scene had the fat sidekick with a cleaver, threatening a gang of bad guys, when some old lady walked by selling butcher knives from a huge pack on her back. Cut to next scene of the fat guy running with his cleaver while a dozen guys chase him with butcher knives.

Eye Candy: 3
I scored this one very low since this was simply an ugly movie. Partially because the film and cameras weren't very good and some scenes were actually out of focus, but mostly because the settings were just ugly. Dirty city slums, crumbling apartment buildings, dark and dirty night clubs, poorly-lit caves, etc. On top of being ugly, it was frequently very dark, and while I liked to see a movie that actually was dark when you'd expect it to be, it was good to see why Hollywood movies always have good lighting even in pitch black locations... because it sucks to not be able to see what's happening on the screen!

Some of it was for effect and mood, but I think the main problem was that they just didn't have the budget to put up all the lights and to use the high quality cameras that most modern movies use.

Fun Factor: 6
This one goes hand in hand with replayability. The fight scenes were great and a lot of fun. Most of the rest was crap. If you could watch just those, it would be a fun film to watch parts of over and over again.

Replayability: 6
I'll probably get the DVD, just so I can FF to the hitting. I can't imagine sitting through the whole film, start to finish again, though.

Must See on the Big Screen: 2
I don't often include this rating, and I'd forgotten about it with the last dozen films I saw in theaters. I'm bringing it back here though, since this film is especially easy to skip in the theaters and buy on DVD. In fact I actually recommend it, since there aren't any visuals that need to be seen full size, and you won't get much thrill seeing this in a theater with other people.

Overall: 7
Not to belabor the point, but it's got good fighting and lame other stuff. If I weren't a fight fan I'd have given this one about a 2.5. But since I am, I'm scoring it for other fight fans. You have been warned.