When Tony Jaa’s elbows collided with pulverizing force onto a combatant’s skull in Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003), he might as well have been delivering a blow to early-‘00s action itself. Suddenly, martial arts cinema had been given a new bar to top and a new muse to inspire fresh fight scenes. Two years later, Donnie Yen was unleashing MMA takedowns and full-contact weapon duels in SPL: Sha Po Lang (known as Kill Zone in the United States). Before making The Raid (2011), Gareth Evans debuted the skills of Iko Uwais with what’s effectively an Indonesian Ong-Bak in his film Merantau (2009). For a time, Thailand’s genre output kept continually raising that bar. Between films like The Protector, Chocolate, Bangkok Knockout, and Power Kids, the bygone days of Hong Kong’s death-defying stunt work and ferociously wince-inducing choreography seemed like it had been reborn for a new millennium. However, that explosion in Thai action was inseparable from the influence of the late director, choreographer, producer and stunt team founder Panna Rittikrai, and his distinct “no strings attached” maxim. And arguably, no film better embodies that than 2004’s Born to Fight.
One has to specifically distinguish it as the 2004 Born to Fight because 1984’s Born to Fight was Rittikrai‘s directorial debut. A low-budget regional film, it nevertheless captured his prowess for bone-crunching melees and stunts in all its brutal glory. Behind the camera and in front of it as the lead, Rittikrai crafted an ode to the popular Hong Kong films of the ‘80s (complete with an opening showcase of different fighting styles like drunken boxing) in a movie that featured both gangster ninjas and stuntmen flinging their bodies through billboards. At least one of those would return in the 2004 in-name-only remake of his own film, which ditched the story entirely while amplifying the carnage exponentially.
Hot off the success of writing and choreographing Ong-Bak, Rittikrai bookended 2004’s Born to Fight with utterly unhinged no-strings-attached stunt spectaculars. Exposing undercover cops leads to an opening 10 minutes of dual-wielding John Woo-style on top of speeding semi-trucks, stuntmen tumbling off these massive vehicles only to then painfully bounce off passing trucks and flaming speeding semis crashing through shanty shacks à la Jackie Chan’s Police Story. There may be no moment more terrifying in modern stunt work than seeing a man’s head pass literal inches from truck tires; it’s raw physical how-did-no-one-die-making-this cinema at a level that 20 years later feels unimaginable even in this decade of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster stunts and actors doing their own John Wick-inspired action.
Between that mad opening and the 40 minutes of chaos that closes out the movie is a half hour or so of plot. Dumb-fun paper-thin plot for sure, but just enough to contextualize the bloodshed to come: cop Deaw (Dan Chupong) joins his taekwondo champion sister and other Thai athletes in a charity event at a village, only for a militia to take the villagers hostage. There are demands to release an imprisoned general, there’s a nuclear missile aimed at Bangkok just in case the stakes weren’t high enough, and it’s all schmaltzy Die Hard-ish fluff until the Thai National Anthem plays on the radio to inspire the villagers and athletes to murder the absolute hell out of their captors.
The 1985 film Gymkata is often touted as a goofy action gem of gymnastics-themed fights but even its acrobatic beatdowns pale in comparison to the mayhem that Rittikrai unleashed in the second half of Born to Fight. Uneven bars become the ideal arena to land crushing dropkicks to chests, and frenzied machete strikes are dodged via pommel-horse acrobatics. Grenades are bicycle-kicked back to sender, and soccer ball trick shots disarm gun-toting bad guys. A gymnast high-dives off a roof to ambush a .50 cal gunner and turn the weapon against militia goons, performing a perfect-10 tuck-and-pike in the process. All while pyrotechnics explode so close to actors, and strikes impact bodies so hard, that once again the thought of how-did-no-one-die becomes a constant during every set-piece. The kinetic gunfights, and the sights of a one-legged man and a child destroying hapless foes with Muay Thai, practically become icing atop the cake of action scene lunacy that Born to Fight so graciously delivers. Then a man crashes himself headfirst off a motorcycle through a flaming billboard, as if Rittikrai had to top his own 1984 stunts just one more time for good measure.
His 2004 spectacular may unfold as thin story justification for jaw-droppingly dangerous and impressive stunt work, bone crunching choreography and odes to Hong Kong-style set pieces, but the film achieves exactly that in brilliantly ambitious fashion. Panna Rittikrai passed away in 2014, leaving behind a legacy of bruising blistering bonkers entertainment and of stars like Tony Jaa and JeeJa Yanin. Twenty years later, Born to Fight triumphs as a snapshot of a style of action that likely can never happen again and of a country’s action boom whose industry influence still reverberates through modern cinema.
The post Holy Hell! Born to Fight Turns 20 appeared first on Spectrum Culture.