Tony Jaa, action cinema’s favorite Muay Thai fighter, has faded from the limelight a bit after a quiet decade so far. He entered into it with Dimitri Logothetis’s 2020 Jiu Jitsu, where an ancient protectorate of ordained jiu-jitsu fighters protects the world Avengers-style against a would-be alien invasion. A long way gone from Ong-Bak (2003) and SPL II: A Time for Consequences (2015), the pick-me cash-bag tackiness of Jiu Jitsu preludes the rest of the performer’s work this decade. He was added as a less important side character, a Thai cop, to the Mainland money-making franchise Detective Chinatown in the series’ third entry (2021), while 2023’s Expend4bles proved to be as dumb and useless as its slovenly-spelled title. His supporting role in Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2020 Monster Hunter, which was both a good film and a good action film, is the lone stand-out in his very periodic post-pandemic work.
Enter the brand-new Striking Rescue, his latest go-around and another entry in his Chinese filmography. It may be a new release, but there is nothing new under the sun in director Cheng Siyi’s (Desperado) tirade against drugs and poorly digitized action. A drug lord kills the wife and kids of Bai An (Jaa), and so he seeks revenge, partnering with an afflicted young girl on the way (He Ting, played by Chen Duo-Yi) and dismantling the drug empire, mostly by playing whack-a-mole with the bad guys. Jaa’s Bai An doesn’t talk much, and when he does, it is in an uncomfortable English, creating a communication barrier that the film never really attempts to resolve. He obviously isn’t here to talk, though, but is instead around to drive his flying knees into the chests of child killers — which he does plenty of. All of which is to say, it’s not entirely unimaginable that some algorithmic machine spit out the premise for this Chinese production.
But the truth is that, regardless of any such extraneous details, a Jaa film will only ever be as good as the action that empowers it. It’s unfortunate, then, that the filmmaking in Striking Rescue misunderstands the appeal of Jaa’s choreography, including the impressive stunt work (heavily supplemented with digital effects) that the team accomplishes in here. He is a Muay Thai man through and through, a martial art that uses the entire body in almost every strike. His famous flying knees work beautifully in front of the camera because of the combination of their high-speed fluidity and full-body physicality. This is why the wide-screen and medium-to-long shots of his early work, like Ong Bak, worked so flawlessly (a tactic, in turn, borrowed from the Hong Kong action cinema that inspired him): his whole body, from toes to the top of his head, was involved in the fighting and the camera captured that. The photography in his latest film instead takes an impact-oriented approach, zeroing in on individual blows by providing close-ups of the violent impact. It’s a Hollywood-inspired touch that works better with something like boxing-oriented action, such as with Korean action star Ma Dong-seok and his famous heavy hand; the movement of the whole body matters less than the movement of his swinging haymakers. By adapting to this approach, Striking Rescue cinematographer Ai Yanjie loses sight of much of the action and regrettably tempers the blows of the stunt team.
Not all of the action has been specifically Hollywood-ized, though. There are a few nods here to a mode of action filmmaking that originates in Chinese and Hong Kong cinema, where, like a sports highlight, the same action spectacle forgoes the standard cinematic relationship to time and instead repeats from several angles or perspectives. (The climax of this style might have come in Jackie Chan’s (in)famous Police Story (1985) stunt where he slides down a pole wrapped in live electrical lights in the shopping mall.) Striking Rescue exhibits this penchant for “rewinds” and thus overpronounces its fights on a few occasions. Instead of extending the awe of the spectator, this technique has the opposite effect in Cheng Siyi’s film, where the phoniness of the fights — the computerization of the action — becomes simply inescapable when viewed multiple times. The use of this highlighting technique also comes across more as a stylistic cameo than anything of deeper aesthetic import, a hypothesis supported by the insignificance of the stunts with which it is used. Sure, these exchanges between Jaa and his opponents are fun enough to behold in the moment and pack a violent punch, but they are a far step away from Jackie Chan’s most lionized stunt work that justified the technique, and this failure to understand its own material proves to be a persistent blight on Striking Rescue’s ambitions.
DIRECTOR: Siyu Cheng; CAST: Tony Jaa, Junjia Hong, Yu Zing, Philip Keung; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; STREAMING: April 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
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