Raging Phoenix

This is the second film of the supremely talented JeeJa Yanin, who starred in Chocolate a couple years back. Chocolate was like a trumpet blast followed by the announcement: "We now present to you the next great martial arts star, JeeJa Yanin!" Raging Phoenix is a perfect follow-up. Yanin plays a punk band drummer who is kidnapped by a ring of white slavers. A group of young men who have had women in their life harmed by these people save Yanin and train her in the martial art of Thai drunken boxing. Like most martial arts movies, the plot is pretty negligible. It's actually kind of weird, because it begins as the same kind of gritty realism of Chocolate but eventually veers into a more fantastical landscape where the villains are abducting women to extract their tears, which they make into a perfume that drives men crazy. Or some such nonsense. Who cares? The bottom line is that Yanin kicks every ass that anyone chooses to hand to her. And she's super freakin' cute while doing it. I'd probably rank it below Chocolate, but I'd say it's about at the same level. If you liked that film, this is a no-brainer.

Having bought this movie solely on the reason because JeeJa Yanin was in the movie, and I was amazed with her performance in "Chocolate", so I had high expectations for this movie.

I must admit that it was somewhat of a struggle for me to fully sit through this movie to the end, because it had a tendency to drag out the story in a seemingly endless spiral, and took forever to go almost nowhere. The storyline was adequate enough, women getting abducted by Thai gangs, but drained of their pheromones to make a perfume? What? Are you kidding me? The story went horrible awry when that was revealed. Up until then, the movie was actually bearable.

The fighting scenes in the movie were well choreographed and well executed. There was lots of fast-paced, adrenalin-fueled action in the movie. And Thai movie makers really got a knick for this, and this movie is another dent in the belt.

That being said, then a lot of the movie, including the fight scenes, were rudely interrupted and tainted by a horrible attempt to add comedy to the movie, in the forms of the characters Pigshit and Dogshit, pardon my French, but they were actually named this in the movie. They were dreadful to look at and worse to listen to, with horrible lines and bad comedy. The movie really suffered from this approach to film making.

If you have seen "Chocolate", do not set your expectations up after that standard, because this movie is inferior to that movie by far, and inferior to the first "Ong Bak" as well. Sure, there are nice fighting scenes, but it is far from enough to carry the movie.

And what was up with the gang members jumping around on pogo-stilts? That was really lame. Who fights with such toys strapped to their feet? Come on... And the whole feeling to the underground lair of the gang was way out of proportions. Where would such a place be found? The complexity of its built, the depth in which it was found, and how would no one know of its location? Sure it looked somewhat nice, but it was too much.

For a Thai movie, it was very mediocre. Trust me, there are far better Thai action movies available. "Raging Phoenix" (or "Deu Suay Doo") might be worth a look if you are a big fan of JeeJa Yanin, but otherwise not really worth the time unless you got nothing better to do.

OK i have to admit i am generous when i give an 8, because i was to other movies as well a couple years ago. I know when i watch a martial arts movie to not look too much at the story, more on the fights. But since i started to go back on martial arts around 2 years ago and started my collection(which is now over 300 movies) i find the same problem going on with every THAI martial arts movie. To the Tony Jaa's to the unknown's. The fights are always very impressive, but the story is always CRAP !!! This movie is no exception. Some could say the initial synopsis is not that bad, gang abducting womens and heroes going after them. But where TAKEN(with Liam Neeson) succeeded in that department, this movie does not, going from one weird thing to the other and so on. The heroine training is pretty good and the initial plot seem pretty find, its later it become like "whatever". At least the fight are VERY impressive and well choreographed so you never get bored and always stay in the movie. But i would wish sometimes the Thais would learned that a good yet simple plot of a movie is the best way to showcase awesome martial arts. You don't need fancy stuff, you don't need weird stuff, you don't need stuff the audience would be like "huh....ok" . With Thais movie, its always the same thing, either a relic has been stolen and the hero goes after it, or its supernatural stuff. I don't know, maybe they should check the simple, yet effective formula of the US movies of the 90s. Hero got his ass kick, go back and train to a master, come back and kick the ass of the bad guy. I don't know... sometimes in martial arts the simpler plots work best, if you have good fighting to display and i can assure you this movie has.... Please people from thailand... leave the supernatural out of the martial arts movie... we don't wanna a cross over between star wars and bloodsport... we want just good ol martial arts.

Movie as such is pretty simple and straight forward with a twist in between which actually jinxed me. However, saying that, the only reason I watched it was JeeJa Yanin and her martial arts skills.

I was browsing through action videos in youtube and came across this movie's last action sequence which kind of so much impressed me that I was curious to watch the full movie. It went smooth and I wasn't expecting much too. But, by God, this lady had some skills and showed perfectly in martial arts. I remember watching Tom Yoom Gung earlier of Tony Jaa and that action star is the only other Thai actor which impressed me with his techniques. Bravo. JeeJa Yanin, in the same way, performed her own style and who knows, it could be taken as a reference in other action movies. Am now eager to watch her movie Chocolate. Fingers crossed.

RAGING PHOENIX, a high-kicking Thai martial arts film, marks Jeeja Yanin's follow-up to her outstanding debut, CHOCOLATE. While proving to be a mildly entertaining movie with some great fight action to recommend it, it's an inevitable disappointment to those of us weaned on the likes of ONG BAK and WARRIOR KING, as it just doesn't hold a torch to the calibre of those two movies – or, indeed, Yanin's aforementioned debut.

The problem with this movie is pretty much everything aside from the action: the characters are cardboard-thin, the plot is shallow and the script is completely stupid. By the time we're introduced to the storyline of the villains harvesting the tears of their victims, you'll be rolling your eyes and saying "oh please". In addition, the acting is strictly drama school, and that includes Yanin; none of these guys would make it in a film requiring real performances.

Good news, then, is that the action is what this film is all about, and it lifts what could have been a debacle into something pretty entertaining; no WARRIOR KING, certainly, but something to be enjoyed at least once. The dance-infused combat sees Janin and her anarchist rebel friends battling a series of nefarious villains, and it inevitably builds up into a massive battle in the bad guys' lair (a ridiculous CGI underground chamber).

At the end, Yanin finally meets her match – a hulking Amazonian fighter by the name of Roongtawan Jindasing, a real-life bodybuilder and judo expert. The resultant fight takes in multiple locations, some exquisite camera (the bridge scene in particular) and goes on for about half an hour without ever getting dull; seasoned action director Panna Rittikrai ensures he gets the maximum mayhem for his money.