So you might think that it could be forgiven for trying, badly, to rip off those recent Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movies. This is a fight movie after all by a team with fighting movie pedigree.

During ‘intrigue’ that doesn’t interest, they try to occasionally lighten things up with humour that doesn’t amuse. Basically Jaa gets caught up in a dangerous story of international super villains with twists and turns that defy logic… and interest. It falls to an old sequel trap – try and outdo the original by going bigger and more ambitious. The story in The Protector 2 is an outrageous convoluted mess. In the original movie, the bad guys were basically poachers. The movie sees Kham’s (Tony Jaa) elephant get kidnapped once again. Sadly, it’s not more of the same at all, a complete botch. So that said, a lot were looking forward to The Protector 2. That’s why Universal jumped through hoops to get him for Fast 7. When the likes of Matt Damon were kicking ass in indecipherable jibberish fight scenes in the ’00s, real action fans found solace in the likes of Tony Jaa. Wickedly brutal fight scenes, yet so clear and cohesive. Their follow up, The Protector (2005), was almost as good. It was a showcase of brutal and satisfying fights pinned to a plot that wasn’t unnecessarily OTT. One, no wires or CGI, a fact that was used heavily to promote the movie. Ong Bak (2003) is one of the best fighting movies ever shot and probably the best fighting movie of the ’00s. What To Expect: The worst thing that can happen to a sequelįew might realise it but before Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais, there was Prachya Pinkaew and Tony Jaa.

The protector 2