Thai action director Prachya Pinkaew of 'Ong-Bak' and 'The Protector' fame offers up his most accomplished work yet with 'Chocolate' which centers around a young autistic girl whose idiot savant powers snub counting matches and instead embrace kicking ass and taking names.
The film might lose a little bit of bone-crunching brutality due to the loss of Tony Jaa as our hero when compared to Pinkaew's earlier films, but first-time actress JeeJa Yanin more than made up for that loss with an utterly fascinating performance as both an autistic girl and a believable martial-artist who can take down swarms of enemies without breaking a sweat.
Yanin trained for two years before making this film and it shows in the action sequences where she makes all the acrobatics and fancy choreography look effortless. Pinkaew has come a long way as a filmmaker and not just a action choreographer as he's also able to fashion a coherent, even moving, narrative to give that much more resonance to action; always a sore spot for his Jaa efforts which were essentially a martial-arts display with little of interest outside of that.
The premise is a bit far-fetched but the performers embrace it with such conviction that I was immediately won over. The film starts with a Thai crimelord's female henchman falling for a Japanese yakuza gangster and getting exiled. With the Thai crimelord threatening to kill them both if he sees them together, the yakuza gangster heads back to Japan to save them both.
The woman later finds out she's pregnant and has and raises an autistic girl named Zen (Yanin) who then gets paraded around by her adopted brother Moom to show off her special abilities of being able to catch things thrown at her from any angle.
Observing a Thai kickboxing school next door and watching Tony Jaa movies, Zen emulates the style where we discover that she a natural affinity for ass-kicking.
When mom falls ill and can't afford the necessary medications, Moom and Zen head out and try to collect money owed to the mom from various shady characters. When these shadies laugh in their face and kick 'em out on their butts, Zen applies her years of martial-arts emulation to good use by making her way through the loan ledger book and attaining the money by any means necessary.
It sounds silly but works much better on the screen with Yanin's fully-fleshed out character being a virtuoso protagonist. Busting heads in an icehouse, a meatplant and on and across and up five-level building ledges, there's never a shortage of great stunt-work and ominous weapons to endanger our young gal. The meathouse is particularly brutal with swarms of cleaver-wielding thugs trying to slice up our young heroine.
The filmmakers realize this might be a bit too much at times so the mood gets lightened every so often so this won't end up as 'Midnight Meat Train' (an example: a thug throws a cleaver at our hero only for her to dodge it with the cleaver bouncing off a crosswire fence and coming back at striking him in the shoulder in which he then looks at it incredulously). While a young girl is constantly in danger, that fine line is walked as to keep this fun and not cross over into genuinely disturbing.
Ultimately, it's the great blend of dazzling action choreography and the distinctive developments of the narrative that make this one of the best martial-arts pics of recent memory.
I was reminded of late eighties/early nineties Chinese action pics that achieved the same thing i.e. 'My Father is a Hero' and 'Hard Boiled'. By the time the Yakuza father comes back at the end to finally settle things between the Thai crimelord, the film becomes breathless with both Zen and her father having to team up for a blood-soaked, sword-swinging finale.
Magnolia gives 'Chocolate' a 1.78:1 1080p VC1 encode and the pic looks outstanding for being a low-budget Thai film shot over two years. With a mostly dark and golden color palette, detail and color stand out consistently and the differing locations offer up some distinctive looks like the cold blues of the icehouse and the neon-lit reds of the meathouse.
For audio, we get a Thai DTS-HD Master Audio track as well as English DTS-HD Master Audio track. I'm a purist so I would always recommend the native language but both tracks sound like they were mixed the same and will rock the house.
Special Features are expectedly a bit light with only a nine-minute making-of being featured that. There also three previews for other Magnolia Blu-ray releases 'Splinter', 'The Signal' and 'The Host'. The latter two I own and highly recommend.
For martial-arts fans, this is a must-own, particularly if you're familiar with and enjoy Tony Jaa's work but the acrobatics of Jackie Chan and Jet Li are also firmly on display here. With a charismatic turn from lead JeeJa Yanin, a new female hero should be born here; one might even hope for a Jaa/Yanin team-up? With great Blu-ray specs backing up the pic, this comes highly recommended.
Chocolate [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
Your Talkback on this Story