Directed by Prachya Pinkaew and starring Nicharee “Jeeja” Vismistananda, Chocolate is basically a story about love. Yes, it includes some cool fighting sequences – who wasn’t awed by that scene in the commercial where Jeeja knees someone into what looks like an air shaft? But the sequences are not as hard or as fast as Tony Jaa’s. They felt a tad cautious in comparison and less flowing. Yet not everyone can be Tony Jaa, and I’m happy with Jeeja as Jeeja.
Chocolate’s basic story follows the voluptuous Zin who works for a Thai crime boss. She falls in love with a Japanese yakuza, but her jealous boss promises to hurt her if he ever catches her with that yakuza. Zin sends her yakuza boyfriend back to Japan to protect him. But out of Zin’s affair with the yakuza is born Zen (Jeeja), an adorable autistic girl that takes to mimicking the Muay Thai kickboxers that practice next door. When her mother gets sick, Zen and her childhood friend try to gather money for her mother’s medication by collecting the debts owed to Zin. Of course, no one wants to listen to an autistic girl and her roly-poly friend, so Zen resorts to violence for the sake of her mother.
The storyline is much better than a typical martial arts movie’s. Compare this story of an autistic girl protecting her mother to the director’s previous films Ong-Bak and The Protector with Tony Jaa. I understood Tony Jaa’s quests for the stolen Buddha statue and elephant in each movie, but I won’t deny that people laughed in the theater when he demanded his elephant back from the villain.
The first part of Chocolate, before the fighting started, actually moved me – although I did get a bit antsy waiting for the fighting to start. The beginning has several well-paced and well-placed montages overlaid with sweet, though faintly old-fashioned, music.
Once the movie ended, I realized how much it had relied on family dynamics, and how much I had appreciated watching Zin transform from a seductive beauty to a loving, cancer-ravaged single mother. The heartbreak at the end for me was realizing that Zen was just a girl defending her mother; she never thought of herself as a martial artist.
I would recommend this movie to anyone. I was a little disappointed with the fighting sequences, but I realize that once you’ve seen Tony Jaa fight, even a girl touted as the female Tony Jaa can’t match him. Not so much because she’s a girl, but because he’s Tony Jaa. Nonetheless, I enjoyed watching someone in a dress take out a gang of bullies after catching a knife in her hand, and I hope Jeeja goes on to make more powerful martial arts films, films that address the plot as much as they do the fighting.
