Tom Yum Goong — Date Movie — capsulefest movie reviews

by Chris   ⋅   June 5, 2006   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

Tom Yum Goong
Goddammit! Someone has stolen Tony Jaa’s elephants! Now he must fly to Australia to rescue the purloined pachyderms and, with his trademark flying elbows, knees, and crazy stunts, kick the asses of the persons responsible. The story has sort of a retro-cheap, slapped together sort of feel; quite like the Cinemax-grade actioners of the 1980s. You know, the kind whose biggest stars would be Eric Roberts and some anonymous breasts. It’s quite drawn out, and it’s overly serious gangland drama, dramatic as it is ludicrous, had me eyeing the fast forward button more than once. But, then again, no one really watches a Tony Jaa film for its story. The film holds one signature sequence, a roughly five minute fight shot entirely in one long take, following Jaa as he enters a nightclub and proceeds to kick the ass of everyone in his path as he ascends the building’s five stories. People are tossed though banisters, down into the central rotunda, through windows. It’s wonderfully chaotic — choreographing the sequence must have been a nightmare. Fans of Jackie Chan should keep an eye out for multiple nods to Rumble in the Bronx, and a brief cameo by the man himself in the Sydney airport scene. The film is scheduled to be released by a new subsidiary of the Weinstein Company, focusing entirely on Martial Arts films, so expect a trimmed down, restored version of the film at your local Blockbuster in the coming months. Usually I am against the Weinstein treatment of martial arts films, but given this film’s terribly slow story, and the god awful picture on the Thai DVD release, I think it might actually be a vast improvement.

Date Move.
Oh. My. God. I thought nothing could possibly be worse than the Scary Movie films, but Date Movie has proved me wrong. Date Movie is so stupid, so hackneyed, and so devoid of laughs, to describe it with words like “shitty” would be to give it undeserved praise. This is a rotten, mildewed hairball of a film. The filmmakers’ idea of parody seems to be based around these three steps: 1. Recite multiple lines from movie X, so that audience knows that subject of scene is movie X. 2. Insert gross or inane joke. 3. In case audience does not realize reference is to movie x, repeat step 1. In case audience does not find joke funny, repeat joke again. Repeat steps 1 through 3 for the next five minutes. This may be fun for fans of Family Guy, but for anyone else this will prove unbearably painful. The “spoofed” films range from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Wedding Crashers, Napoleon Dynamite, Jerry Maguire, Hitch, Pretty Woman, Say Anything, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Kill Bill (Tarantino being famous for taking the parody/collage format and playing it straight). Pop culture references include the Paris Hilton Carl’s Junior commercial, and television shows The Bachelor and Pimp My Ride. When none of these parodies work, the filmmakers crib jokes from other, better comedies, such as Dumb and Dumber (toenails) and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (big undies). A nauseating still-birth of a film. Stay away at all costs.

Chris Nelson is a Technical Writer turned Java Developer, living in the Silicon Valley. He is currently studying for a Software Engineering degree at San Jose State University.

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