Ong-Bak

I'm no martial arts fan, but I was pretty excited to go and see Ong-Bak, a Thai movie starring a guy called Tony Jaa. I went and saw it this afternoon.
The story is pretty simple. Ting (Tony Jaa) has just become the best fighter in his small country village, but then his teacher tells him not to ever use his skills. (Ha! Like hell he won't. We know better!) Some young gangster from the city (Bangkok) comes in and steals the head from their Buddha and returns to the city with it. In a village meeting to decide what to do about this crisis, Ting volunteers to go and get it back. He goes to the city to try and get it back.
The first scene is insane. The young men of the village are trying to scramble up a big tree, each one tries to push the other off, lots of them fall out of the tree, and pretty high up too, some of them. How did these actors not get hurt? Even if they are stuntmen, how could it not hurt? The scene is amazing, but it's simply a warm-up for what comes next.
Even though Ting was told by his master not to fight, not to use his Muay Thai fighting technique, he is soon put in a position where he has no choice, which is in a Bangkok fight club, up against an enormous GI Joe-looking monster. From that point on, the movie sets up a variety of scenarios for Tony Jaa to display his AWESOME moves. These include machine-like punches, blocks and chops; acrobatic cartwheels that end in crunching kicks; high jumps that land with elbows hard down on the skull (I cannot understand this one - how could that not hurt yourself? Wouldn't you sometimes accidentally hit your funny bone?). There is a long chase scene through a market where Jaa somersaults over tables, jumps through a roll of barbed wire, does a split slide beneath a moving truck and jumps to run across enemy heads.
The whole way through, Ting is a damn likeable guy. He's only fighting these idiots because he has no choice, and he has to get his village's Buddha head back.
Another thing, the music was very good, a different kind of music I have not heard before.
One of the minor characters stood out for me. He was one of two big boss gamblers in the Bangkok fight club, an older guy with a tracheotomy who used one of those devices held up to the throat that made his voice a robot voice. These always get my attention because when I was 10 I had a paper route and one of my customers was a man who had one of these devices. I always got a little creeped out when I peddaled up to sell him his paper, and he would say *THANK YOU* in his robot voice.
Anyway, Ong-Bak was damn good, amazing, totally awesome and breathtaking, a guaranteed-to-make-your-damn-jaw-drop movie that I will recommend to EVERYBODY, whether they give a flying spin kick about martial arts movies or not.