Fists of fury, mouth of marbles

Reviewed - Warrior King/Tom-Yum-Goong: 'BAK with a vengeance!" reads the publicity slogan for Warrior King. That's not a typographical error but a signal to aficionados that the core team behind Ong Bak, released here last autumn, has reassembled for another energetic Thai action movie - the director, the martial arts and stunts choreographer and the two leading actors.

The early stages of Warrior King lull the viewer into unexpected serenity as it charts the idyllic childhood of its hero, Kham (Tony Jaa), as his father trains him in martial arts against attractively photographed rural Thai locations. When crooks steal the family's beloved elephants, the grown-up Kham embarks on a single-minded quest to retrieve them, which, after a terrific speedboat chase, takes him to Sydney. The only clue he has is the name of a restaurant, Tom-Yum-Goong, named after the hot and sour Thai prawn soup, which doubles as the movie's original title.

A former stunt double, Jaa registers as a blank screen presence when he's not fighting, but he more than compensates when he gets down to action for a succession of dazzlingly choreographed sequences. He eschews modern movie devices such as CGI and wire work, and director Prachya Pinkaew wisely holds the camera back to fill the frames with the inventively staged fight sequences.

The highlight is a breathless four-minute continuous take employing Steadicam to follow Kham's progress up through four floors in a Sydney brothel run by a ruthless transsexual mobster Madame Rose (played by a Chinese transsexual ballerina, Jin Xing). The lithe, elastic-limbed Jaa single-handedly - and single-footedly - takes on all comers in one bone-crunching battle after another, until he's faced with an apparently indestructible giant (Australian wrestler Nathan B Jones).

It is unfortunate, then, that the plotline devised to string all these action sequences together is so flimsy and yet clumsily structured, and that the movie founders in pointlessly extended expository scenes. District 13, another recent effects-free action extravaganza featuring former stuntmen, shrewdly keeps the narrative detail to a minimum and is altogether leaner and more effective as a result.