Coyote Review: Chocolate

[cyrano]

This is another Thai action film, by the team that brought you Tony Jaa in Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong. The basic premise is that an autistic girl learns Muay Thai from practicing what she sees on television and what she sees the boys in the yard doing. Then her former-gangster mom gets cancer and she goes around kicking bad guy ass to get the money they owe her mom to pay for her medicine.
The story is a bit clunky, more so I thought than Ong Bak, but this is a Thai action flick and so the story can be dispensed with--it's just a shame that, if we were going to go that route, we didn't get to the ass kicking sooner. There are some cool set pieces (from what I've heard, there were two sequences, homages to Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, that had to be cut for legal issues) and lots of using the scenery as part of the fight rather than just a back drop, which I always like. There are quite a few 'impact' moments where you flinch and think "Ow. That must have hurt a *lot*." And, of course, there are the end credits where they show you people screwing up their action cues or misstepping and saying "Yeah, this hurt a *lot*."
Nothing like Iron Monkey or Legend, but definitely fun. I give it three wags--worth a rental.