The Protector

Tony Jaa
Johnny Nguyen
Petchtai Wongkamlao

Directed by: Prachya Pinkaew


My father wasn’t much of a football fan so when I was a kid most of my Sunday afternoons involved sitting around the television set watching a marathon of some of his favorite films; old, badly dubbed Kung Fu flicks. The Protector will remind many fans of this type of film, only with a less cohesive and almost incomprehensible plotline. The Protector is the story of a young man named Kham (Jaa) who grows up in a village that prides itself on protecting and raising elephants that may one day be fit for the King’s army. When our hero’s father decides to take his prize elephant to town to have the king’s guards look at it, he is killed and the elephant is stolen along with Kham’s favorite baby elephant. Kham learns that the elephants have been taken by a gang who pride themselves on eating exotic animals. He has to fight his way to the leader of the gang to get his elephant back.

Anyone expecting anything close to Tony Jaa’s first American film, Ong Bak, will be pretty disappointed. The film spends too long trying to set up basic plot points. This diverts the film away from the potential of more martial arts and only drags the film. The filmmaker then abandons its train of thought, tying everything together with something as strange as a reporter popping up to explain what just happened and to tie our hero to what is supposed to be a more convoluted plot. This cinematic device actually happens more than a few times in the film and eventually becomes nothing more than an easy way to segue from scene to scene without giving a reason. This would actually be acceptable in a film where the action is the main attraction if the filmmakers didn’t spend so much screen time trying to fit the story together. What we are left with is a poor film with a few action scenes instead of what should have been an action heavy martial arts flick with some semblance of a story.

There are a few really incredible action scenes that rival those in his previous film, but the intensity of those scenes is diminished by really shoddy editing and what comes across as a lazy job of sound dubbing. The problem is more and more noticeable as the pace of these scenes gets faster and faster. While this film may remind people of the old days of the Shaw Brothers action Kung Fu films, the fight sequences are not only too few and far between, they are too poorly put together to warrant sitting through this entire film.


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