Muay Thai Giant Blu-ray offers solid video and audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
Seven foot gentle giant Barney Emerald is drugged and robbed while on holiday in Pattaya. Two Thai sisters, one who speaks English, the other,a Muay Thai kick-boxing champion, befriend him so he can recover his passport. When Barney eats the spicy "somtum", it has a physical reaction, sending him into a raging and violent martial-arts frenzy. The girls use the somtum to control Barney's powerful reactions to earn back his money and take down the local crime lords.
With the help of producer/director Prachya Pinkaew and breakout star Tony Jaa, the Thai martial arts movie boom of the mid-2000s landed some
heavy hits in its early years—Ong Bak, Tom-Yum-Goong, Chocolate—but, lately, it seems like each successive film that
washes up on U.S. shores is limper and more watered down than the last. Nonetheless, this now-soggy genre must still have its followers, as Magnolia
Entertainment continues to import Thai beat-em-ups with otherwise inexplicable regularity. No, I don't understand it either. Their latest release,
Muay Thai Giant, is surprisingly more bearable than some of its excruciatingly bad predecessors, and though that's hardly high praise, the film's
relative watch-ability is much appreciated. I don't think I could've sat through another Raging Phoenix or Tsunami Warrior, both of
which left me wishing someone would knock me out with an elbow drop to the head. Muay Thai Giant's saving grace is its goofy, unassuming
tone. There's no melodrama here—okay, maybe a bit—and no self-seriousness. Instead, we're served up a silly martial arts adventure about a trapped
tourist who totally hulks out when he eats red peppers.
Barney Emerald, gentle giant.
Said tourist, Barney Emerald, is played by 6'11", 350lb Aussie actor Nathan Jones, who you might remember from his roles in Fearless,
Troy, and Tom-Yum-Goong as an enormous, dumb-as-bricks, uncontrollable ox-of-a-man lunatic. You can understand why he's
often typecast—he's a former WWE wrestler, a World Strongman Challenge winner, and he once served seven years in a maximum security prison
for a string of armed robberies. The dude's a kinda-scary badass. But not here. Jones shows us his softer side as Barney, a gentle giant who wins a
trip to Thailand but finds himself half-naked, penniless, and stuck in the country after getting drugged by a group of passport thieves. Wandering
aimlessly around the party town of Pattaya, Barney shows his cowardice when he inadvertently gets involved in a scuffle between Katen (Nawarat
Techarattanaprasert), a young pickpocket, and a group of menacing thugs. Katen's older sister Dokya (Sasisa Jindamanee) comes to the rescue with
her expert martial arts skillz—the "z" seems appropriate here, somehow—and the siblings agree to look after the hapless foreigner while he waits to
get his passport back. At their mom's beachside restaurant, the sisters introduce Barney to somtum—a salad made with papaya and peppers
—but when he takes the first bite, he turns red, goes berserk, and tears the place to the ground in a fit of superhuman strength. Obviously, this
reaction to somtum will eventually come in handy. You might say it's Muay Thai Giant's variation on Chekhov's rule about seeing a pistol in
the first act of a play.
This being a Thai martial arts movie, there are bound to be some idiotic criminals who are up to no good, and sure enough, we have a group of
diamond thieves trying to smuggle some loot out of the country inside a laptop that can only be opened when a specific gem is inserted in an optical
reader on the top. Katen nicks the tiny jewel from the baddies, of course, and the P.O.'d gangsters' hunt for their glimmering MacGuffin provides
most of the film's dramatic conflict. (Also, there's the business of Barney retrieving his passport and rebuilding the restaurant he accidentally
demolished.) It all leads to a bang-up finale at a rural airport, where—surprise, surprise—Katen conveniently and inexplicably finds the ingredients to
make somtum. Barney flies into his pepper-induced rage, kicks some ass, electrocutes some dudes, and plays chicken with a taxiing jet.
(Spoiler alert: the jet loses.) In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is an exceptionally dumb film. The script is a joke, the "acting" is across-the-
board terrible, and—what's really weird—I can't really tell who the movie is trying to entertain. Serious martial arts fanatics will be turned off by the
non-stop juvenile silliness, and those who can appreciate the slapstick Looney Tunes humor—namely, prepubescent boys—will be literally turned
away by the film's R-rating. The best I can figure it, Muay Thai Giant is meant to be watched by frat-house stoners.
At the same time, the film at least knows that it can't be taken seriously, unlike, say, the most recent Tony Jaa movies, which are way too deadpan
for their own good. Muay Thai Giant may be stupid, but it's sweet too, and Nathan Jones—prepare for a backhanded compliment—makes an
admittedly great simpleton. He's a loveable oaf, like the Incredible Hulk crossed with Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, Jones'
fighting abilities are downplayed here. He has a handful of scenes where he gets to be a bull in the proverbial china shop, but the focus of most of
the action is on Sasisa Jindamanee, a bonafide junior Muay Thai boxing champion. (Thai film fans will recognize Jindamanee and her co-star Nawarat
Techarattanaprasert from 2009's Power Kids, which Magnolia released in the U.S. last year.) Which brings us to the most important
question: Are the fights any good? I'll just put it this way—they don't really give us anything we haven't seen before. Faces get kicked, elbows are
dropped, and there's no shortage of wall-hopping gymnastics, but it's all rather tame. The best fight is when Dokya teams up with the owner of a
papaya stand to take down some out-of-their-league thugs. (One of whom—for reasons unexplained—is drinking soda through a straw out of a
plastic bag. Is this a thing in Thailand?) I had no idea fruit could be wielded so fiercely.
I don't expect much—visually or otherwise—when it comes to these Thai martial arts movies, so I was surprised that Muay Thai Giant looks as
good as it does. Granted, there's nothing here that would qualify as eye candy, but the film's 1080p/AVC encode is reasonably sharp and colorful, with no
major compression gaffs or other issues. While the image has a processed, flat, video-ish look in many ways—with occasionally blown out highlights,
sometimes weird color grading, and grayish blacks—the movie was actually shot on film and has a largely natural grain structure. Soft, almost out-of-
focus shots creep in more than once, but most of the film has a decent level of clarity, displaying a modicum of fine texture in the actors' faces and other
areas where you usually look for it. Likewise, color has adequate depth and vividness, even if skin tones go pasty and some hues look under- or
oversaturated at times. The picture quality isn't stunning, but it's more than acceptable for a film called Muay Thai Giant.
As usual, Magnolia has provided an original language track—a mix of English and Thai—and an all-English dub, both in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. First
things first: I'm just happy that Muay Thai Giant doesn't feature the usual butt-rock/bad hip-hop soundtrack that normally accompanies these
kinds of film. The music is actually more melodic and light for the most part—there are a few excursions into overdriven riffing—and it sounds great, with
clarity and fullness. You can probably imagine what the rest of the film sounds like. Blows land loudly, wood splinters and metal rends, and the effects,
while not realistic by any means, at least carry appropriate low-end oomph. The rear channels are mostly used for the score, but ambience occasionally
ekes out—chittering monkey sounds, crickets, cheering crowds, etc.—and there are a few big cross-channel movements during the fight scenes.
Dialogue sounds a bit low in the mix throughout, but never to the extent that you can't understand what's being said. Optional English, English SDH,
English Narrative, and Spanish subtitles are available in easy-to-read lettering.
The Making of Muay Thai Giant (SD, 6:50): Your usual assortment of behind-the-scenes footage intermixed with interviews from the
actors and director.
Behind the Scenes of Muay Thai Giant (SD, 9:06): Additional on-set footage, showcasing some of the stunt work and fight sequences.
International Trailer (SD, 2:47)
Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment Blu-ray (1080p): Includes trailers for Black Death, Vanishing on 7th Street,
Rubber, and Four Lions, as well as a promo for HDNet.
Muay Thai Giant is the latest cornball martial arts flick to cross the Pacific, and to be honest, I'm not sure who it's targeted toward. Too silly for
adults and too violent for kids, the film seems geared for hyperactive 12-year-old boys, but carries a prohibitive R-rating. Still, I suppose
someone is getting a kick out of this stuff, otherwise Magnolia wouldn't bother with the U.S. distribution rights. The acting is awful and the fights
are nothing we haven't seen done better before, but at least Muay Thai Giant doesn't take itself as seriously as some of its predecessors. The
biggest compliment I can give it is that I managed to sit through it without checking my watch or wishing that Barney Emerald would clobber me into
blissful unconsciousness.
Magnolia Home Entertainment has announced Muay Thai Giant (Somtum) for Blu-ray release on April 26. This action comedy from Thailand centers around a gentle 7-foot-tall man who, whenever he eats spicy somtum, has a physical reaction that sends him into a martial-arts ...
