“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
I didn’t expect too much from Bangkok Revenge, but as I liked Jon Foo performance in TYG and Tekken so I gave it a go.
Jon looks great on screen, he has gymnastic prowess and martial arts skills, but this time he didn’t use his strengths, probably because of director’s and fight coordinator’s lack of skills to use his abilities right.
French director Jean-Marc Mineo made this movie definitely with some idea, but the final product became nothing truly outstanding. Stunts and fight are good, but this is all that you can get from Bangkok Revenge, no adrenaline-inducing fighting choreography.
Mineo is an experienced filmmaker with more than 20 films and TV credit so I cannot explain why this effort is so amateurish.
The athletic Foo shows off some neat physical moves but most of the action sequences are uninspiringly mechanical and he doesn’t quite reach enough level of badassery during 80 minutes.
The plot is simple: Manit, a boy of ten years witnessed the murder of his parents. Unrelenting, the killers decide to eliminate it. Shot in the head, the child survives miraculously from his injuries but finds himself struck by ataraxia. The damage to his brain took away any emotion. Saved from certain death by an old martial arts master, Manit, 20 years later becomes a real war machine, returns to the place of his childhood. Justice is going to fall, and men will die.
A simple story about revenge as you can understand from the title besides that this movie also was known as Rebirth and Bangkok Renaissance.
Bangkok Revenge will remind you of a lot of classic martial arts films:
- Rescue scene from a hospital reminds Hard to Kill with Steven Seagal
- Bar fight reminds Van Damme‘s bar fight from Kickboxer
- Forest training reminds Loren Avedon’s King of Kickboxers
- Manit’s runs around Thailand reminds Ong Bak with Tony Jaa
- The scene with Manit tied to a grid reminds No Retreat, No Surrender 3 with Keith Vitali
- Elevator fight scene reminds Merantau with Iko Uwais
- Subway fight reminds Ninja with Scott Adkins
Jean-Marc Mineo mixed all good tricks to make this movie for 1.400.000€ but eventually gave birth to an absolutely empty product with completely bad acting, plot holes, and thin characterizations. All characters seem like suffering from the same physical disability as the main character.
And why a scruffy French boxer is here?
This is the type of martial arts movie that most of you would be more interested in fast-forwarding, just to get to the good action sequences.
