10. Ting Vs Slash and his fight club buddies (Ong Bak)
You know what I hate; guys with hair like Slash bitch slapping waitresses in underground fighting pits. Man, that gets my goat. So when just that scenario cropped up in Ong Bak, imagine my glee when Ting kicked the t**t right in the face and floors him like a child running into a patio door. What follows is ground breaking use of Muay Boran and Muay Thai in a wonderfully choreographed fight involving 3 opponents of increasing prowess. Sweet. It is easy to forget how bad ass Ong Bak was when it came out. Tony Jaa was the first genuinely fresh talent in the martial arts genre for a decade and the film was an international hit, not to mention a critical success. Really Ong Bak is a terrible movie, the story is stupid, the acting is at best weak and at worst head ache inducing and the production values are noticeably shaky. However, the film is totally redeemed by the unquestionable talents of Tony Jaa and the stunt team, who fuse traditional Thai martial arts with film fighting techniques picked up from years of Hong Kong kung fu movies. The fight club esq scene works so well because it is actually the most simple action scene in the movie. Later on you get flaming knees, insane flips and spin kicks and even a tuc tuc chase but in the fight club scene you get to relish the bone crushing power of Thai martial arts. Where a kung fu fighter would use jumping kicks, Jaa uses jumping knees and elbows and it is actually a surprising change of pace when you experience it for the first time. Now every martial arts film from Thailand is aping Jaa's style, but no one has yet emerged that can match Jaa's physical prowess. He has inherited Jackie Chan's agility, Jet Li's perfect poise and Bruce Lee's dynamic power but he has also brought his homeland to the fore front and given the people of Thailand a style of action that they can be proud of.