Ong Bak

Ong-Bak stars Phanom Yeerum as the earnest Ting, a martial-arts hero to the little backwater Thai village of Ong-Bak. The very first scene has him competing in a brutal variant of capture-the-flag, which involves climbing a tree naked and throwing everyone else off the branches with one’s bare hands (or feet, or whatever else is handy). Not long after, gangsters vandalize the town’s statue of Buddha, tearing off its head and hocking it on the black market. Ting is incensed, and with the support of his village elders, heads off to the big city to get it back.Ting is totally unequipped to deal with city life, and he’s no detective, either. When he hooks up with his old friend George (Mum Jok Mok), who’s now a wheeler-dealer in the city’s underbelly, George stiffs him for the seed money he received from his fellow villagers for the mission and blows it on a cage match. Ting follows him to the fight club, literally walks into the middle of a battle, and before he knows it is fighting an army of the meanest Bangkok street brawlers imaginable. (He also doesn’t understand showmanship: when the first challenger charges him, Ting puts him down with one blow to the side of the neck. Blam! End of fight.)