They say violence doesn’t solve anything. This is patently false, since a quick look through the annals of history reveals that, one way or another, violence eventually solves everything. This goes some way to explaining why we as a species are quite happy to sit down and watch fellow homo-sapiens getting kicked in the head for hours at a time. When it’s done well, it’s damned entertaining, when it isnt…well, see my review of Bangkok Adrenaline.
Raging Phoenix, the latest attempt to recapture the halcyon days of Ong Bak, is as silly as you might expect. After escaping a group of pheromone harvesting kidnappers (yes, you read that correctly),
hot headed Deu is taken in by the mysterious Sanim and his creatively named friends Pigshit, Dogshit and Bullshit. They’ve all been wronged by the kidnappers and decide to train her up as bait that fights back. Quite what any of this has to do with Phoenixes or Rage in general is anyone’s guess, but suffice to say, it’s a good excuse to beat the tar out of a lot of people in new and interesting ways.
It’s quite difficult to get a read on performance when watching some foreign language films, but for what it’s worth, I found the characters amiable and fairly magnetic. It’s all too easy to cram films like this with muscle bound idiots, but here the martial artists seem to have taken the novel step of going to acting classes and it serves them well.
As for the fights themselves, they are as graceful and skull crunchingly brutal as we’ve come to expect from the Thai industry ever since Tony Jaa launched it to international attention half a decade ago. Unfortunately the film rather blows its load on the first sequence, an astonishing fight between Sanim and a group of goons on razor-edged spring-loaded stilts, and never really finds that level again.
Rating films like this is tough; on the one hand it has little or no artistic merit, unless of course you count punching people in the neck as an art form. On the other hand it is a half decent spectacle, and if you’re into this kind of thing, Raging Phoenix pushes most of the right buttons.
Overall Verdict: As long as you’re not expecting anything too deep, this a well made, albeit very silly slice of knuckle crunching action.
Special Features:
Trailer Gallery
Cast Interviews
B-Roll Fight Scenes
Reviewer: Alex Hall