Point is, "Ong Bak" was thin on plot, long on action, serving as little more than a vehicle for Jaa's feverish ass-kicking. But what's the first thing you do when you have a successful movie like that? That's right, a sequel. Or in this case, a prequel, set hundreds of years before the original, loosely explaining where Jaa's mad fighting skillz come from. Because when you're dealing with a film franchise, the basic rule of thumb is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially when you've got a guy like Tony Jaa, who can break just about anything.

 

So with that in mind, Jaa plays Tien, a boy tossed from a speeding horse by a man hotly pursued. Captured by slavers, he is freed by a pirate lord who offers the boy the opportunity to join his merry band of brigands and learn some serious martial arts. Which he does, of course. Now throughout the process, we see through flashbacks that explain that he's no bad guy—he's actually descended from some sort of royal lineage, something we had no doubt about when he was tossed from that horse.

 

But it's a pirate life for Tien, which he takes to, becoming a guy who will beat you down pretty much any you choose. Hand-to-hand, swords, this is the sort of dude who can even dominate a herd of elephants. (Seriously. He dominates an elephant herd.) Of course, we know that all of this is going to lead up to a confrontation between his present and his past, and when it finally does, the result is a pretty awesome fight. The issue behind "Ong Bak 2" is that you don't really care about the journey. You're only there for the kung-fu fighting, and even though the movie has a great look to it, the story is really just a tale as old as time, one you've seen before and don't really need to see again. The time and energy spent telling it is wasted, because all you want to see is Jaa knocking the hell out of the bad guys. The good news is that when he's doing that, "Ong Bak 2" is awesome. But when he's not, this tale as old as time feels about that long, too.