Review: Chocolate

Please do this to anyone with that haircut and shirt, any time, any place. Photo courtesy Magnet.

More than likely, it's been a while since you've seen a kung fu movie. There were the Jackie Chan years, the Crouching Tiger times, but those are largely gone, and true martial arts ass-kickery is for the most part missing from American cinema houses. Why is this? Has the general skill level gone down? Is Parkour, the French fast feet phenomenon, leg-sweeping the populace? Is that too many feet references in one sentence? The answer to all of these questions is: maybe.

But no matter the reason, you owe it to yourself to sit down in a theater and watch a solitary fighter take on an exorbitant amount of faceless villains. Groin kicks, knees to the face, jumping off stuff / ducking under stuff; sometimes you just need it in your life, but you don't feel like talking shit to a bouncer to get it. In times like these, it's best to plunk down a few bucks and leave the bone crunching, bad dubbing, choppy editing and outlandish plots to the professionals. Or, in the case of Chocolate, you can leave it up to a little asian girl who's autistic, but isn't afraid to tell henchmen what time it is. Here's a hint: it's you-got-your-ass-kicked-by-a-mentally-challenged-girl time. Trust me, it's even better than it sounds.

Chocolate has everything bad that you want in a good kung fu movie. FIrst, there is the generally unassuming lead asskicker, in this case Muay Thai fighter Jeeja Yanin as Zen, the special needs girl with a vivid knack for picking up and mimicking physical movements. The plot, as you can imagine, is largely unimportant, and in Chocolate isn’t even that well accounted for. You will leave the viewing of this film without a clear sense of why young Zen needs to fight her way out of her circumstances....her mother is ill and needs money, but the vendetta against an older man she’s never met....and the mysterious book of debts? It doesn’t make sense, but you don’t care. You probably will care that, as an autistic character, director Prachya Pinkaew devotes some serious screen time to Zen screaming and howling, which fails to connect the audience with the protagonist in any way, and is sometimes downright annoying. But after the confusing and superfluous and melodramatic opening scenes, Chocolate really picks up steam and keeps rumbling along, almost despite itself.

There are even laughable moments to Chocolate that will endear your heart to the wonderful world of kung fu all the more, like the unanswered question of why every shopkeep in Zen’s mother’s debt immediately resorts to attempted murder as a solution. These are wonderfully absurd moments that break up the tightly choreographed ball-busting and eye-gouging being splashed all over the screen. And it should also be noted that, much like Pinkaew’s other success story, Ong-Bak, the action is completely real. There are no wires, no stunt doubles, just wounds and perseverance and more than a few blunders (these are shown as the credits roll, and add just one more level of awesomeness).

All in all, Chocolate deserves to be seen. Be fully prepared to roll your eyes at plot choices, furrow your brow at confusing or missing cinematic elements, and to laugh out loud at the most unbelievable plot twist that won’t be repeated here. But if you can deal with this, and you certainly should if you wish to enjoy any good kung fu flicks any time soon, then definitely take a look at Chocolate. It’s wacky, absurd, and physically impressive... what more could you want?

Chocolate opens in theaters on February 6th.