Matt_LRR said:
Chocolate has long been a guilty pleasure of mine. The setup is so tasteless, but the action is SO GOOD.
Pretty close to what I was going to say. I don't know if I'd go quite as far as tasteless, because it's actually
less bad than many portrayals of autistic kids (aside from the stereotypical "savant" thing, which is extremely rare in reality), and they did manage to put in some details for the way her character acts/moves and her personality traits that I haven't seen too often that were appropriate, even if they could've done better. The plot/story itself, on the other hand, is typically schlocky martial arts action movie stuff, with the added bonus of the type of uniquely Thai quirks that not everyone may be familiar with if they haven't watched much else from there, like the obligatory ladyboy hit squad.
The action really is SO GOOD, though. It takes a little while for the movie to really pick up momentum, and the earliest fight aren't quite as spectacular as later on (for legitimate story reasons), but once it gets going, it doesn't let up. The fight choreography is absolutely brilliant at times, and if you stick around through the credits, you can see that they filmed it all live at full speed without stuntmen (and took some brutal hits to the face and elsewhere when they screwed up). I can't help watching it again every few months.
Jeeja herself is pretty amazing, too. There's just something fun about watching this tiny, little girl channeling Bruce Lee and unleashing the fury on a room full of grown men. Zen (her character in Chocolate) would give River Tam a run for her money. Unfortunately, her second movie, Raging Phoenix, was an absolute disaster. The plot is an unintelligible supernatural clusterfuck, and the fight scenes are nowhere near as interesting to watch and don't take advantage of her skills. She does supposedly have four more movies that she's working on that are coming out this year, though, some of which may even already be out, including a sequel to Chocolate, so maybe there's still hope.