What happened to Tony Jaa? The mid sized (5’8″) Thai martial arts star was widely regarded as the next best thing in action films following his breakout films in “Ong Bak : Muay Thai Warrior” (2003). Even so, his international crossover success seemed to falter a little after the Ong Bak sequels, even as he never truly exited the scene, owing to the production issues that the sequels faced.
However, Jaa most recently appears as Jett in the 2020 hit Monster Hunter, the eurasian video game hex film alongside his science fiction dark comedy film Detective Chinatown which headlined the record shattering Lunar New Year comedy. Jaa looks good in an ensemble but he has not starred in a lead role for more than 10 years, aside from the popular spin-offs of the Hong Kong cops-vs-crooks film Sha Po Lang or Killzone in the United States.
A Chinese-made film starring Tony Jaa called “Striking Rescue” now shows him in the midst of a raging, multi-person brawl. The movie has given him a commanding presence from the very beginning and going by Jaa’s name, the action gives away exactly why he has such a commanding persona. He sets the tone by helping bail fans with a sneak peek of his raw and ocean consuming energy in the first fight. Baai, who he is portraying, kicks open the doors of an unnaturally massive warehouse filled with enemies, to which leans against the heavy wooden door ready to take a beating, roaring “Why? Who hurt my family?”
The “Striking Rescue” isn’t going to take the audience for a spin and the creators aren’t in a rush to answer An initially. To ease the viewers into the story, we are introduced by Ann’s wife and daughter who had been killed in a drug attack and later on find out that this was just the beginning. He Ying-hao, a wealthy industrialist who means well but is clueless, has been introduced into the mix as well, adding to the chaos.
The only point of emphasis in the very beginning of the film would be Tony Jaa’s anger and the plethora of stuntmen in the film. Everything in the film from the beginning consists of powerful, cooling lights paired with breathtaking choreography that would hint recently Jaa had taken a break, only to return, stronger than before.
Even though this work begins on a brisk note, “Striking Rescue” does not always bother with Bai An. Rather, a number of scenes concern Ying-hao’s courageous pre-teen daughter, Ting (Chen Duoyi), who can’t accept a reality in which her father is anything but the strong-willed and just man she knows him to be. An abducts Ting and that brings her directly in the path of Ying-hao’s disguise’s slow-burning drug dealer Mr. Mao Clay (Mao Fan), who has been disguising himself as a businessman with Ying-hao’s firm. Ying-hao has even a tall, taciturn security man Wu Zheng (Eason Hung) who is also ready to champion him. Hung is good, but his combat sequences do not have the frenzied spark and gripping intensity of Jaa’s scenes, thus making it difficult to have a certain degree of live-wire stimulation.
Even so, there are sufficient delectably pulpy spins and conversations all over “Striking Rescue” to balance out the most difficult bumps in Ann’s well-loved road. Given that he has everything to gain and a whole lot of elbows and knees, he is indomitable and a large amount of broken English words can do him zero harm, though the rough translations no doubt do make things worse. Such (numerous) translation blunders can turn out to be embarrassing to the extent that Jaa and his overwhelming majority of Chinese colleagues go on grandiose rants and verbally beat each other up in their attempts to promote the comic book story that the movie supposedly is. Most endearing in this, are the moments when Guo Yulong, the stunt director, leads the actors and frees them to demonstrate their skills, for example when Jaa flies and Guo promotes various baddies’ elbows or when Jaa rides them elbows-first or toboggans through the other actors.
Of course, the action sequences are probably the biggest draw to “Striking Rescue,” but they are not the only thing worth watching. There’s almost enough off-kilter energy to keep pace with Jaa’s frantic energy. It is the sort of shoot-up revenge film which never has any need to be self-conscious or apologetic, and so even the most groan-worthy of the film’s one-liners somehow still entertains. I particularly like when a drug monger, Ting, says, “My dad and I are big-time drug haters” or when Shi Yanneng, one of Clay’s heavies, says, “I think I overweight. You do not possess the qualification to be my rival,” as though he is M. Bison and has just bested Jaa in Street Fighter II.
Bad transitions and poor spoken English can be a source of irritation along with the poorly-mixed images; they can also convey a sense of enthralling tension to the film. In our opinion, “Striking Rescue” would be best qualified to be played on those display TVs for several months along with the other titbits that a small home video store in Times Square used to display: blurry Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen movies along with overexposed trailers.
In Jaa’s most recent work, there is plenty of action to keep fans satisfied, and the filmmakers strive towards their genre conformities so much that it mildly startles one when, in a subsequent bout, Ann’s low energy gets a weird but a necessary spike when his adversary mentions his wife and child. It is at this point that Jaa reaches for a tiny aluminum bat that was held on a wall and begins to swing it. We welcome you back Mr. Jaa, for you have been missed.
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