Short Review: The Protector.

Premise: After an elephant is stolen, a fighter/protector must travel to Australia to retrieve it and fight anybody who gets in his way (including a very Cruella Deville-type villain).

Starring: Tony Jaa.

My Reaction: This movie is beyond ridiculous. Looking at that premise, you have to think "Is this a parody/comedy?" But it isn't. It takes itself very seriously. The worst part about the movie was its awful editing. It would jump from one thing to the next without any transition. And then even within scenes, it bounced around. It was so distracting and terrible. I've never seen a worse editing job in a movie. And then you have the weird subbing/dubbing issue. A third of the time, characters are speaking their natural language and the movie is subtitled. Fine. Another third of the time, you have white characters speaking English as per usual. Also fine. But then the other third of the time, you have the Thai characters speaking English, but their voices have been dubbed over. And not that they were speaking English and they just got a different voice. But you can clearly tell they were speaking their native tongue and somebody dubbed over in English. It's so freaking weird, mostly because the movie already relies on subtitles and also already has English-speaking actors, so to dub over others is mind boggling. Now, I've also seen Tony Jaa's Ong-Bak, which I felt was also disappointing, but not to this degree. Though it had a lot of technical issues as well. But the two share one thing in common: they both have some pretty great action. And that's the only thing that helps it. Does it save it? No. The editing is too awful for even the action to save it. If it weren't for the editing, I could have looked at it like a really crappy B-action movie with a ridiculous story and bad dubbing/subbing issues. But I can't. I fell asleep about halfway through and didn't care enough to finish it this morning before sending it back to Netflix. And I should have figured as much when the credits start and I see "Quentin Tarantino Presents..." Outside of maybe Jet Li's Hero, any movie he "presents" is awful. If you were gonna watch this movie for anything, it would be the action. Otherwise, just... skip it.

The Zed Word