Chocolate-2008 Thailand Review.

Hello All,
Jonny T here bringing you a review of the pretty kick ass Thai movie from 2008 that is Chocolate.
The story starts based upon a forbidden love affair with a Thai female gangster and her Japanese Yakuza lover, There i s constant fighting and killing between the Thai and Japanese gangs that culminates in the Thai lady becoming pregnant and the Yakuza departs back to Japan, Story moves forward a few years and we get to see the birth of the young girl known as Zen, The DR tells the mother there have been some complication's and the child will require special needs, we see her young life unfold with various harrowing scenes of her being scared by basically anything or anyone around her and she shows a fascination with kung fu flicks and starts to practise the moves, she befriends a rather chubby boy who is great and helps her out and ultimately her mother who sadly develops cancer, he takes her around the streets performing what he calls a ball trick wherein anyone from any angle can throw a ball at her and she will catch it without flinching, he uses this and her to generate money required for the expensive treatment and drugs that her mother needs to hopefully get her on the road to recovery.
Then one day they find one of her mothers old books and hand written inside is a list of people that owe her a ton of money from way back and it's ,ore than enough to help pay for all the medical bills so they set off on the trail to pull in all the debts.



Needless to say this takes them to deal with some very dodgy characters the first lot they come up against is in an ice factory and they are told to get lost, seeing her mother so ill and after watching a few more kung fu flicks notably the one she watches mostly at this time is the other classic Thai kung fu flick Ong-Back, she decides to return to the ice factory, and when it all kicks in out come the Ong Back Tony Jaa moves!
The girl who plays Zen is Jeeja Yanin and it's difficult to tell how old she was when this was made but boy does she know her moves and zips around the screen kicking ass with breathtaking skill and speed, for example, there is one seen where she jumps from a balcony and land on top of a cabinet doing the splits!
The film follows pretty formulaic steps wherein the next place they go to gets more harsh especially the scene in the meat factory where she has to overcome her fear of flies and meat hooks are involved, some pretty nasty kills!But having said that the last 20 minutes or so are non stop action, there is a scene straight from kill bill in the Japanese tea house where she takes on around 30 guys, then here estranged father turns up and takes on about another 20 with a samurai sword and she has a pennant for copying many styles of fighting she see's as in her influence with Ong Bak and then i kid you not a retard kung fu guy with a massive twitch comes at her and kicks the shit out of her until she starts to replicate him!! But the scene that made it for me was the one where she is chasing and also being chased by a ton of gangster up the side of a building, leaping and kicking from one side to another whilst bouncing off street signs and bouncing the gangsters off ledges to the ground below, that's the great thing about Thai cinema it very much harps back to the early Jacki Chan insane stunt fests such as Armour of god and the like,
So in summing up, the first 20 minutes are at times painfully slow but please stick with it and you will NOT be disappointed,
Breathtaking stuff,
8/10
Jonny T.

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