Action Pants

As I attempted to come up with a good opening for this review, the only things I could think of were awful puns based off of the title. Things like “like its title, this movie is really sweet,” and crap like that. It’s because of stuff like the above that I am rambling about movies on the internet and not talking about movies while sitting in a T.V. studio made-up to look like a movie theater. I’ve come to accept this.

Onto the movie; it’s named CHOCOLATE and the only reason I can figure that it’s named that is because the hero enjoys eating m&m’s. Otherwise sweetened snacks do not play a prominent role in the happenings. The movie is about some lady named Zin (played by Ammara Siripong) who is in with the mob in some fashion (it isn’t really explained how) and she falls in love with the leader of a rival mob. She leaves the rival dude so as not to be killed or whatever, but not before getting knocked-up. After getting an appendage removed by her mob boss, she decides to go into hiding to protect her daughter’s appendages. She also learns that her daughter, Zen (who will eventually be played by JeeJa Yanin, but not at this point, because she’s only like five), has some kind of autism thing going on, but instead of counting things really quickly like Rain Man, she has super-human reflexes and can catch anything that is thrown at her. She also watches a nearby fighting school and a few Tony Jaa movies which make her into a fighting machine…I am still waiting for similar results.

Because God has a sense of humor the mother gets sick, and not a little cold or the swine flu; we’re talking expensive, drain-your-piggy-bank sick. So her live-in nephew decides to go collecting money that various gang-people owe her. The gangs are not very sympathetic to the plight of others, so the daughter engages them in elaborate martial arts scenes to get the drug funding.

Geez; that’s a long synopsis, but that’s basically the movie. Once the debts start getting collected it moves from one fight sequence to the next without much letup and it’s awesome. I will say that the setup to get to the fights is about twenty minutes to long and boring as dirt. To make things worse, nothing is really explained well. I actually kind of got lost when it came to people’s relationships to others so I just started making stuff up in my head that seemed to make sense. This worked for me, your mileage may vary.

It’s in these early parts that the problems with the script and acting really show, because that’s all there is. I understand that the director wanted me to sympathize with these people, but it basically fails at that. Oh well, nice try I guess.

The good news is that once you get passed the opening stuff and the money collecting is in full swing, it kicks ass. It basically becomes a video-game, with Zen going from level to level just beating the tar out of people in brutal and fancy ways. Exotic locations like a warehouse and meat-market are used; with people jumping over, sliding under and being tossed through all manner of stuff. There’s also a scene that starts in a restaurant, proceeds to the roof of the building, then to some kind of dojo, then to the rails of an elevated train, then the side of a building and finally ends up back on the same roof. That’s the level of crazy you get in this thing. I must give extra special props to the “side of the building” scene; it’s pretty crazy to see stuntmen just tossed off the side of a building and land on the ground without any wires or stuff like that. These guys really took one for the team; the team being me.

In fact, that’s really what makes these fights so awesome. The fact that there isn’t any wire-work or lame CG (except for a CG fly that seemed out of place, but I guess flies are pretty stubborn actors) just elevates the proceedings. These are just stuntmen and women getting pounded and tossed off of buildings for the love of getting pounded and tossed off of buildings.

Check out these outtakes from the ending credits to see what I’m talking about.

I can’t think of much else to say about this movie, so I’ll call it right here. If you can manage to stay awake through the first thirty minutes of CHOCOLATE, you’ll be in for a rockin’, martial-arts treat. HA! Chocolate is a treat! I own the English language!