Thailand’s Tony Jaa has made such a name for himself as the new Bruce Lee that his bone-crunching fight-fest Ong Bak caught the attention of Luc Besson (The Fifth Element). He remastered Prachya Pinkawew’s film with a new soundtrack and took it to the world stage. When a sacred Buddha is stolen from his village, Ting (Jaa) heads to the capital to retrieve it; he falls in with a small time crook and falls out with a relic-stealing criminal mastermind. After the creaky exposition settles down, what follows is one hundred minutes of brilliantly staged Muay Thai (Nine Body Weapons) as the unlikely couple forge an alliance of good against evil. Pinkawew borrows a leaf or two from the Jackie Chan handbook to keep his hero honest. There’s no carnage or deliberate violence but self-defence is an entirely different matter… What Jaa lacks in comic timing, (here comedy is found in the film’s clunky dialogue, over-acting and old-fashioned direction; think Hong Kong chop-socky of the mid-70’s), he makes up for with breath taking dexterity. This is the stuff that makes Ong Bak, a handsome film, hum and it hums very loudly when you consider that no wires or digital trickery were used in these action scenes. It’s all real folks; wysiwyg filmmaking replete with jaw-dropping chases, fight sequences and tuk-tuk terror. Throw in a stiff lesson about the black-market trade in cultural theft and Ong Bak is not a bad way to spend a couple of hours in the cinema. // COLIN FRASER