• Directed by Manop Udomdej
• Starring Sophita Sribanchean, Kessarin Ektawatkul, Jacqueline Apithananont, Saranyu Wongkrachang, Pete Thongchua
• Released in Thai cinemas on November 5, 2009; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 2/5

When he set out to make Vanquisher, director Manop Udomdej might have had a globe-trotting, labyrinthine, intrigue-filled political thriller like Syriana in mind.

But about all Vanquisher and Syriana have in common is a CIA agent named Bob, who in this case is not played by George Clooney.

Involving sword-wielding Thai operatives for the CIA pitted against their American former handler and a terrorist who may or may not be a double agent, the message seems to be that the Americans are fomenting the violence in southern Thailand and want to see an escalation so they can expand their war on terrorism to Southeast Asia.

Which is ridiculous.

There's a scene of a market bombing in a southern town. But the reasons for the terrorist acts and the southern separatist movement are not addressed in Vanquisher's flurry of bad acting, strangely accented English, close-quarters action scenes and cheesy CGI.

And when one of the movie's trailer-worthy scenes involves the lead actress unzipping her jacket to reveal her guns popping out of a tight tank top, and the camera panning around above the actress as it leers down into that cleavage canyon, well any serious notions there were about this movie are dispelled.

Sophita Sribanchean stars as Genja, am extremely fit and action-hungry young policewoman who volunteers for duty with a Thai-US task force. In a rain-drenched training sequence, Genja shows her skills as a swordswoman and martial artist, besting her male assailants while precipation flings from her swinging ponytail. She impresses Sirin ("Nui" Kessarin Ektawatkul), the Thai spy agency's lead fighter, as well as Claire (Jacqueline Apithananont), the CIA's handler.

Genja and the Thai-American team are then sent to southern Thailand to capture a blue-eyed foreign Muslim terrorist leader, but in the confusion of the operation, the members of the Thai team, including Genja and Sirin, are left behind and are presumably blown up by Claire, who has been ordered to destroy all traces of the operation called "Vanquisher", because evidence of it and the CIA's ties to Muslim terrorists could prove to be damaging.


But a year or so later, Genja and Sirin are back at their regular jobs, running around Bangkok, free with no explanation of how they survived. Whose side they are on and what they are fighting for seems less important when there are cool action sequences to get out of the way.

Like an army special-forces unit using off-road motorcycles to attack terrorists in a rubber plantation. The bikes have two people on them. As one soldier drives, another stands on the back with an assault rifle, hosing down anyone who runs.

There's one decent fight between Sirin and a sword-wielding Japanese operative. Taekwondo champ Nui Kessarin from Born to Fight is the only real martial-arts star in this movie and though she appears in most scenes, her talents are pretty well wasted.

The star, Fon Sophita, looks fierce enough, but most of her cool moves appear to be assisted by a rope and harness.

Chewing up the scenery is the nostril-flaring Jacqueline Apithananont from Queens of Langkasuka. Like her role in The Bodyguard 2, she again plays a CIA agent, but is a dirty one. Because Claire is American, Jacqueline has to speak English and she appears to have taken her acting cues from her co-star in early scenes, Nicholas Snow, who as CIA supervisor Bob says his lines in a weirdly halting manner, as if he's trying out for William Shatner's role in a reboot of TJ Hooker.

Poor Jacqueline takes things a step further, totally mangling her lines. Rather than call for another take, director Manop just keeps rolling, making for one of the many bits of unintentional comedy that give Vanquisher its odd charm.

And speaking of scenery chewing, there's also Pete Thongchua, back in the movie business for the first time since 2002's Los Angeles-set Province 77. He brings a certain world-weary heaviness to his role as a yakuza mobster's chief enforcer, who somehow gets mixed up in the plot.

Plot? Oh, that's something having to do with Saranyu Wongkrajang, cast as a Thai Muslim terrorist, who is planning to set off a large explosion that will level Bangkok. Or something.

It culminates in a riot of CGI blood sprays as the sword-wielding female agents hack and slash their way through an endless supply of ninjas in a series of murkily rendered action scenes. As far as I could tell, there was no explanation as to why these Thai women are carrying feudal-period Japanese swords in 21st century Bangkok. They just are. And that's okay.

Manop might have had something a good deal more serious in mind when he first started on Vanquisher -- Thai title Suay ... Samurai (สวย...ซามูไร), literally "beautiful samurai" -- more than two years ago. The troubled production lost one of its actresses, "Amy" Chotiros Suriwong, when the young starlet wore a scandalously revealing dress when she presented trophies at 2007's Thailand National Film Awards. Executive producer Somsak Techaratanaprasert ordered all scenes with Amy scrubbed from the film.

Maybe those were all the scenes that would have made this movie make sense.


Related posts:

• Official trailer for Vanquisher
• Vanquisher is coming on November 5
• Get ready for Suay Samurai, a.k.a. Vanquisher

• Directed by Pleo Sirisuwan
• Starring Narathit Namkang, Pimpawee Kreuangsai
• Released in Thai cinemas on October 29, 2009; rated G
• Wise Kwai's rating: 2/5

An labored exercise in anti-climax, The Scout (Bit Pi-pop Ta-lu Lohk, บิดพิภพทะลุโลก) is a kid-friendly adventure yarn about children who enter an ancient temple and have to run from a giant snake and flying fanged toads.

The kids are pretty stereotypical. There's a new kid in school, Odd, who's arrived with a chip on his shoulder. He's befriended by another outcast, the skinny bespectacled nerd, Ball. Minnie, precocious girl class president hits Odd up for votes in the next election. Making life miserable for them all is the overweight bully Berm, who is bigger than all the other kids in his class because he's stupid and has had to repeat a grade.

The four bond on a Scouts' camping trip (in Thailand, girls are also in the Scouts), and on a dare from the fat kid they decide to check out a nearby temple to see if the legends they've read about there being a big snake are true.

Well, yes, they are true, just like in the guidebook they have, which was written by Dr. William (Yano Kazuki), who has been missing for years. And after the kids step through a secret doorway, it becomes sealed until an eclipse. And right away the giant snake is introduced so that there is really nowhere to go except to have to come back to that giant snake.

That is if they can outrun the slobbering fanged toads with bat wings that swarm around and are generally fun to watch.

Through the passages of the temple, the kids learn valuable lessons about one another -- girls and skinny nerds are a lot tougher than they appear and fat bullies are actually sensitive about their weight. And the new kid in town is still the new kid in town. To get out of the temple and past that giant snake, they'll all have to work together.

More fanciful CGI critters might have improved an otherwise dull story. But director Pleo Sirisuwan and his special effects supervisor and co-writer Parkpoom Suwatipanich probably gave us all they could with whatever budget they were working with for the Logo production house.

Pleo previously directed the insane genre-hopping jungle-fantasy-crime-drama-horror cult hit Vengeance. That one had no end of weird and wonderful CGI creations, and probably a bigger budget. Fans hoping for more of the same with The Scout will be disappointed. So be prepared.


Related posts:

• Gays, a transgender ghost and a giant snake
• Another giant snake in The Scout

With the Science Film Festival going on in Bangkok right now -- yes, yet another film festival -- one of the entries that caught my eye is A Mirror of a Living Train Market (กระจกสะท้อนวิถีชีวิตชาวตลาดรถไฟ), a five-minute documentary produced by the MCOT TV station Modernine.

It's about the famous (or infamous) "train market" on the Mae Klong Railway.

Here is the synopsis:

This story tells about Payao’s life who works as a vendor at the train market in western city of Samut Songkhram where the provincial authorities plan to rebuild the permanent market for buyers’ safety and rail traffic control. She does not want to change this distinguished market. What Payao, the provincial authorities and the train official eye this living train market--- all opinions--- are like aspects of a mirror reflecting the movement and cycles of the market.

Among railfans and tourists, the Mae Klong train market is one of Thailand's most unique sites.

There are lots of videos about it on YouTube. I've posted a short clip above, just to offer a glimpse of the phenomenon of a market that is conducted on the very railbed of this historic railway, with vendors calmly pulling back their awnings and merchandise to let the train through. Once the train is passed, the awnings fold back out and the market returns to doing a bustling business.

The Mae Klong line was inaugurated in 1904. It runs from Wong Wian Yai in Thonburi to Mahachai. Passengers wishing to continue to Mae Klong must take a ferry across a river. Making this connection can be pretty tough or impossible, as detailed in this trip report on 2Bangkok.com, which also has extensive information about the line. Little has changed about it over the years, except for perhaps the move from steam to diesel locomotives.

Not surprisingly, this quaint railway and the market have been under threat for quite sometime, which authorities wanting the market to move as they make plans to refurbish the dilapidated train line.

A Mirror of a Living Train Market is showing several times during the festival, which I think is geared for schoolkids, but maybe the general public is welcome. I am not sure it has subtitles. The schedule is all in Thai, but I've managed to find a suitable screening time at 4pm on Sunday at TK Park in CentralWorld.

TwitchFilm.net and Deknang have stunning first images from Bang Rajan 2 (บางระจัน 2), Thanit Jitnukul's sequel to his 2000 battle epic, which is being produced by Phranakorn Film.

The stills follow a teaser that was posted last month.

It'll be the biggest thing done yet by Phranakorn, which is breaking into the international marketplace while also still churning out the modestly-budgeted country comedies and ghost stories that have done well at the domestic box office.

Twitch's Todd Brown points out that there is a 300-like feel to the stills. And perhaps that is that patriotic "HA-OOH!" feeling that Thanit is going for as he reboots this Alamo-like story of a tiny village that sacrifices itself to holds off the Burmese hoardes.

One thing though, where are the water buffalo?

Update: That's Thai tennis ace Paradorn Srichaphan (ภราดร ศรีชาพันธุ์) making his movie debut. And Photoshopped stills are already making rounds on the Pantip forum.

Along with Emmanuelle in Bangkok, another movie from 1976 that the Thailand Film Office would probably rather people forgot about is Hot Potato, an exploitive action vehicle for martial-arts star Jim Kelly that was filmed in Chiang Mai.

Only reason I mention Hot Potato now is because it's making the rounds on Cinemax, playing at 8 tonight Bangkok time, and I have a cool picture to go with these words.

I don't subscribe to cable and I am not equipped for the heavy lifting it would take to obtain the movie. So I've never seen it. And I'm only familiar with Jim Kelly through his role in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. There, the Afro-coiffed actor was cast as Williams, a super-tough smooth-talking ladies man who's on the run after beating up a pair of white cops who were hassling him. He steals their police car and high-tails it for the tournament on Han's Island.

According to Wikipedia, Hot Potato was filmed in Chiang Mai and is a sequel to Black Belt Jones, which was Kelly's first film as a lead character following the break-out success of Enter the Dragon. In Hot Potato, Jones is sent to "Chang Lan, a fictional country somewhere in east Asia" along with a motley crew of mercenaries to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a senator or an ambassador.

The Wikipedia entry claims it is "one of 'the worst martial arts movies ever made'", and cites IMDb as the source. It could at least be diverting ironic viewing.

For me, I got enough of a taste in a short highlights reel on YouTube.