Chocolate (2008)

Thai action filmmaker Prachya Pinkaew directs newcomer “Jeeja” Yanin Vismistananda in a unique martial arts actioner about a young autistic woman’s efforts to raise money for her ailing mother’s medical treatment by using heightened senses and innate fighting ability to collect debts from a network of criminal fronts prior to a brawling showdown with the bosses. With an impressive fighting debut from the charming star and creative and highly stylized action direction from a skilled stunt team overseen by Thai action great Panna Rittikrai, CHOCOLATE is a sweet treat for martial arts movie buffs despite lightly bitter flaws.

The film could be viewed as a modern-day throwback to 1960s and ’70s-era martial arts movies that made heroes out of the disabled, those blind and one-armed swordsmen and crippled kung fu avengers who turned a physical defect into a fighting asset through specialized trained. Yanin portrays an autistic woman which means that she has naturally heightened senses and the ability to tirelessly focus her mind on a repetitive task, in this case training her legs to fight after watching countless martial arts movies. It’s actually a good premise that just isn’t developed as well as it could have been.

In real life, autism more often hinders a person because the incoming sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of an average environment in the modern world are overwhelming and relentless. It forces a person to withdraw within themselves, to miss social cues and to engage in odd but personally calming behavior such as rocking, pacing or talking to themselves even when others are around. Autism doesn’t make someone stupid or any less of a person and that’s one of several things that Pinkaew gets right in CHOCOLATE even though he takes the same great liberties in portraying an autistic person’s fighting abilities that he did with a normal person in THE PROTECTOR and ONG BAK.

Pinkaew asks too much of his audience in accepting that an autistic girl with virtually no aid aside from the friendship of a portly childhood friend is able to become a supremely skilled fighter capable of taking on any number of knife and gun wielding thugs in some truly unusual fighting venues including a butcher shop and the side of a multi-story building. There are only two points in the film where he allows Yanin to become less than a comic book heroine and in both cases, the challenges she faces are overcome in an exaggerated fashion. At one point she is overcome by the buzzing of flies in a butcher shop and her friend emerges just in time with an electrified fly swatter. Right. Later, she comes up against an erratic fighter with unpredictable movements that threatens to overwhelm her senses until she decides to mimic his movements. If you can get past the fact that nothing we’re seeing here is plausible in the real world, the fighting heroics of Yanin offers tremendous value for the martial arts movie fan.

Jeeja Yanin was first discovered by Pinkaew while auditioning for a part in BORN TO FIGHT. He had been on the lookout for a female counterpart to Tony Jaa, although initially he had hoped for someone with sex appeal akin to Zhang Ziyi. He got something better, an attractive female with a real martial arts background. With help from Tony Jaa, Panna Rittikrai oversaw the training of Jeeja Yanin for two years prior to the production of this film which took another two years to complete with more training all the while. Weerapon Phumatfon and Thaworn Thonapan are also credited with overseeing choreography during the film’s many fight sequences.

Like his previous martial arts films, Pinkaew smartly sets up a series of well defined and highly developed action sequences. There is no doubt by the enormous complexity of each sequence that tremendous planning and thought went into each fight. The level of creativity is particularly high and kudos are in order to the stunt team for keeping all of the action diverse and engaging. This is fight work on a scale and level of dedication not seen since the days when the likes of Lau Kar-leung and Jackie Chan ruled the genre.

The film is somewhat unbalanced with the first half being dominated by the simplistic dramatic set up which leads to the heavy fighting in the second half. Given the backstory of Yanin’s parents in the film and their relationship with organized crime in Thailand and Japan, as well as the complexities of Yanin’s character, the story would have worked better as a television series. There is too much potential for a good story and too little effort to make a good story within the constraints of a 90-minute movie. Although various characters and elements in the film appear underdeveloped, Pinkaew manages them better than he has in his previous films with Tony Jaa, all of which suffer from poor scripts and a tendency to turn action sequences into show-stopping presentation pieces surrounded by filler.

Each action sequence takes place in a unique environment. The first is a short one under a bridge where Yanin battles several punks who disrupt her street performance. It’s the sequence that introduces Yanin, as well as her character, who appears to be ready for primetime despite having previously had no sparring experience or formal training. Nothing could be farther from the truth regarding Yanin herself who had years of experience as a Taekwondo practitioner before Rittikrai and his team started developing her Muay Thai and screen fighting technique.

As a Taekwondo artist, Yanin’s legwork dominates her screen fighting and this becomes her main weapon. Legwork is a device that works well for female screen fighters although it tends to lose some of its allure when used as much as we see here. Yanin uses far less of her hands and elbows and uses too little grappling and ground work which are now considered almost essential for a modern-day martial arts movie to be taken seriously.

Another issue is Yanin’s lack of high-impact kicking. She has the form but sometimes lacks the visible power, partly because of her small statue and partly because of her graceful yet weak delivery. In contrast, former Kurata Action Club member and frequent Hong Kong and Filipino “girls-with-guns” star Yukari Oshima displays tremendous power in her legwork which proves that women can be just as tough on screen as the men are.

All criticisms of Yanin aside, she delivers an impressive debut performance with more than a few distinctive action highlights that are complicated by having to act autistic. In a way, this lets her off the hook by not having to emote naturally during action sequences and it allows the audience to forgive her, and Pinkaew, for letting her shamelessly channel Bruce Lee in her second fight sequence. It takes place in an ice factory which directly references Bruce Lee’s famous ice house fight in THE BIG BOSS (1971). There are no cutaway body slams through paper-thin walls or ice saws implanted in skulls (seen only in deleted footage from THE BIG BOSS) but the sequence still has a lethal air to it with various electric saws buzzing in various positions around the room and occasionally injuring a few of Yanin’s luckless foes.

Pinkaew has lots of fun teasing the audience with the visual suggestion of gruesome injuries that mostly turn out to be more harmless than initially thought. This is particularly true in the sequence where Yanin goes after debtors in a large butcher shop filled with meat cleavers, dangling hooks and sharpened broomsticks. This sequence in particular displays an edgier form of physical comedy, the likes of which world audiences previously saw in the early films of Jackie Chan, such as in DRUNKEN MASTER where Chan pretends to chop up an opponent with a sword, only to reveal to the audience and the character that he only used the flat backside of the blade. The difference here is that Yanin’s character is oblivious to the near-fatal comedy.

One of Rittikrai’s strengths as an action director is his ability, and that of his crew, to come up with sequences that are highly interactive with the environment. CHOCOLATE provides so many wonderful examples of how to do this right. Even when it makes no sense, such as staging a fight on the side of a building several stories up, its fun to watch. Yanin gets into a terrific skirmish in a warehouse where she puts a simple set of lockers to great use. Outtakes reveal that environments in this and other sequences provided the cast and crew with real dangers as well.

The best fight in the film is the first of a three-act finale where Yanin battles three opponents, including two women, on the roof of a building. This sequence provides us with Yanin’s most dynamic performance where she uses virtually every part of her body, both in open and confining spaces with punishing results. I definitely see more of the stunt team’s Muay Thai influence here and less of Yanin’s pure kicking form which is a good thing. There is one sequence in particular that is pure genius. It starts with a deflecting armlock, followed by a backwards left elbow strike. This leads into a back-arching dodge and handstand, followed by a fake out with the left knee and a right leg strike to the face. It’s inventive, fresh and dynamic fight choreography like this that is making Thai film fighting the best in the world as of 2008.

The second act in the final fight is the film’s worst action sequence in every way. It’s poorly staged in a sparsely decorated and fake looking dojo. It reminds me of the equally poorly staged end fight in THE PROTECTOR where Jaa took on Nathan Jones in an empty room with a goofy elephant effigy in the background. Like a video game, the lead bad guys spend most of their time huddled around waiting for all their minions to be knocked out or killed one by one. This is also where we get to see Yanin fight her most unusual adversary, a skinny bispectacled b-boy who applies dance moves to fighting while acting extremely erratic, almost as if he has a mental disability of his own. The match-up had potential to be a highlight but there is no build up to it and the kid actually looks smaller and less powerful than Yanin. The guy comes out of nowhere and there is no explanation for why he fights or acts the way he does. I actually like the idea of pitting a b-boy fighter against Yanin and the choreography is good for what it is, but without story or character support it’s largely a waste.

Whether good or bad, b-boy fighting in martial arts movies isn’t new. Jung Doo-hong and Ryoo Seung-wan briefly fought Korean b-boys in THE CITY OF VIOLENCE and Donnie Yen used early b-boy moves in Yuen Woo-ping’s action/comedy classic MISMATCHED COUPLES.

The rest of the second act devolves into an overly dramatic gun and sword fight involving supporting Japanese actor Hiroshi Abe. It’s a sequence that should have had real substance but thanks to the film’s flimsy script it falls flat.

Abe is an actor with talent I consider wasted on this movie although I appreciate Pinkaew’s effort to tell a multicultural story that makes a Japanese guy in a Thai film a heroic figure. In previous Pinkaew films, we’ve mostly seen foreigners as villains. Abe has a look and level of charisma that could be exploited to brilliant effect by the right filmmaker. I’d love to see him in better scripted international productions. He’s best known to anime fans as the voice of Kenshiro in the animated FIST OF THE NORTH STAR video series. He’s starred in a number of movies that haven’t traveled far outside of Japan but he did have prominent early roles in two Hong Kong films including SAGA OF THE PHOENIX and TOKYO RAIDERS.

The third and final act in the film’s long action finale sees Yanin chasing the remaining bad guys onto the side of a building where the fight continues. This is one of those scenes that sounds great on paper and on one level is fun to watch but ultimately fails in the execution largely because of how canned the staging is. The building should have been used as a way for the characters to get from point “A” to point “B,” rather than as the center stage for a fight sequence. With characters fearlessly jumping around and sugar glass windows looking like a stage set with nothing behind them, the whole sequence looks phony while completely shelving any plot or character development. It’s obvious where wires were used in places. At one point part of the screen has even been amateurishly blurred in post-production, presumably to hide the wires. Admittedly, most of the wires are used as a safety measure and not to enhance fighting movements but who in their right mind would stay on the side of a building to fight? Sure, go ahead and throw a few kicks and punches as you work your away across or down the building but don’t just hang around because the script told you to. With ludicrous logic like that, why not stage characters having a sword fight across two trucks racing through a jungle thick with undergrowth? Oh wait, Steven Spielberg did that with INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL and it was rubbish.

CHOCOLATE is no masterpiece of martial arts moviemaking but it has enough going for it to make it better than your average genre flick, especially at a time when genuinely daring stunt work and challenging, original fight choreography is increasingly growing scarce. The film ends with outtakes revealing the many injuries suffered throughout the production, a testament to the dedication of the stunt crew and actors involved. Despite a flimsy character written for her, over-dependence on legwork and limited striking power, the four years of work Jeeja Yanin put into this film was worth it. She delivers one of the best onscreen fighting performances I have seen in a long time and it’s very impressive given that it’s her first major acting role. For playing a disabled person with minimal dialogue and mostly uninteresting supporting characters, she manages to carry the film quite well, perhaps because the majority of characters, including several transvestites, are so forgettable. Hopefully, we’ll get to see more of Yanin in something truly worthy of her skills and dedication before she puts her action film career to rest. I say that knowing that the average life span of a female actor’s action career is far shorter than their male counterparts.

I appreciate the effort that Prachya Pinkaew has put forth in building up Thai action cinema since ONG BAK but it seems the limits of his directing ability have been revealed after three tries and it may be time he turns the reigns over to some fresh talent, perhaps the Thai equivalent of Chris Nolan. Thai martial arts cinema needs someone with the ability to pick or write a quality script and direct drama and actors. It’s painful to continually see such great action wasted on lousy storytelling.

Related Topics: autism, b-boy, Baa-Ram-Ewe, Chocolate (2008), Hiroshi Abe, JeeJa Yanin, Muay Thai, Panna Rittikrai, Prachya Pinkaew, swordplay, taekwondo, Thaworn Thonapan, Weerapon Phumatfon