Muay Thai Fighter

From Zanecorpwiki

Ehh.

Summary

This movie aims high... and totally misses the mark. It starts out okay, if a bit trite. Three friends from a small village train in Muay Thai as their ticket out, but get caught up in underworld gambling and fixed fights. I was pretty bored by the second half.

To be fair, I feel like I'm missing some cultural context here, but in the end the overreach seems obvious. The movie is in sore need of narrative maturity and focus.

Details and Notes

Mild spoilers.

The real problem with the movie is the two friends that get pulled into the underworld cease to be sympathetic. I mean, it's one thing when they're working off debts and killing bad guys, but by the end they've killed at least half a dozen innocent people on screen so the touching bits just ring hollow. Sure (and I'm not giving anything away) they try to do right by their friend, but who cares? There's no redemption, and the over-sentimentalization undercuts the grittiness of the story.

There are some interesting reveals towards the very end, but they come too late. It's too late to reinvent the characters. A couple sub-plots come to a head in the last quarter of the movie, but they were so weakly developed they end up falling flat. Rather than providing interest, I just thought, "Oh yeah, there was that thing."