Movies have finally stopped sucking (work in progress)

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However, Crank's genuine cinematic integrity keeps it from being a mere sideshow. Much in the way Memento mimics the conciousness of a man with short-term memory loss, the audience is violently pulled throughout the movie using all kinds of camera and editting tricks to emulate Statham's altered state, and the story itself includes several incidents of Fear and Loathing-esque magical realism. While some of these effects are superfluous, they guarantee that the movie, like Statham, never misses a beat.

While Crank is certainly the better film, the action in The Protector is not only more soulful, but genuine. Jason Statham is cool and all, but Tony Jaa is a warrior - an actual warrior. Not only does Tony Jaa do all of his own stunts, he essentially invented a new form of the muay Thai martial art.

In The Protector, there is a scene in which Jaa fights just short of sixty men. Every brutal, bone-crushing blow that Jaa delivers during this sequence is filled with such burning passion and lust for vengeance that I'm surprised that I didn't die in the movie theater. If I were told that every one of those men died during the filming of the scene, I would believe it without a second thought.

While The Protector's plot and direction are unremarkable, it does succeed in one notable cinematic feat - a four minute fight sequence done in a single shot. This trumps Oldboy's single-shot hallway seqence as the longest single-shot fight scene in a movie, though the sequence in Oldboy is cinematically superior.

Just some of Jaa's opponents include a capoeira fighter, a wushu martial artist, a brigade of X Games contenders, and Nathan Jones as an impossibly huge wrestling bodyguard.

I now look forward to Fearless, in which Nathan Jones reprises his role as a fucking behemoth.


(P.S. I found two tickets for The Illusionist in the ticket machine. I turned them in for a refund and I'm now twenty dollars richer. Fuckin' CHA-CHING.