Country: Thailand
Genre: Action/Martial Arts
Director: Prachya Pinkaew
Year: 2008
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Chocolate is a very simple movie. It quickly establishes a situation which will stoke the viewer’s righteous rage, and then proceeds to the main business of the film — an endless variety of excellent fight choreography and stunts, which only get better and more ferocious as the film proceeds.
Chocolate (Yanin Vismitananda), so named because she likes the titular candy, is an autistic preteen with a gift for martial arts, the offspring of the moll of a Thai gangster and a high level Yakuza. The moll has to retire because she “betrayed” her gang, so she is unable to collect the money that’s owed to her. When her mother gets cancer, Chocolate goes around collecting her mom’s debts to pay for her chemotherapy, which generally requires that she kick the crap out of everyone in sight before she can collect the debt. This pisses off the mother’s old gang boss, setting the stage for the final action blowout.
Criticizing Chocolate because it isn’t a very sophisticated examination of either autism or gang life is kind of missing the point. The plot and characters are only intended to serve as background for the fight scenes. By that standard, the characterizations and plot are adequate. Chocolate and her mother are sympathetic. The Thai boss and his henchmen are hateful. The setup is maybe a little slower than it has to be, and I thought a cartoon sequence was pretty weak, but these are minor flaws in a movie that is all about action.
There’s a ton of witty fight choreography. Double and triple kicks, flying kicks, acrobatic maneuvers, and some fairly kinky carnage. At one point, someone ends up hanging upside down from some meat hooks — you know, the kind that they use to hang up ducks in Chinatown. Some poor schmuck throws a butcher knife at Chocolate, misses her, hits a wire fence and before you can say “boomerang!”, the knife is embedded in his chest. In the grand finale, many stunt people fall from a great height, hitting several objects on the way down. I only mention these highlights as an example of what you can look forward to. I couldn’t possibly remember all the great action gags in this movie. Thankfully, there is only a little bit of digital blood in this movie, which looks as phony as ever.
Director Prachya Pinkaew wisely refrains from featuring a tuk-tuk chase or some other lame attempt to compete with Hollywood, which he has neither the budget or the expertise to do. Pinkaew sticks to what he does best, which is direct the best fights since the Golden Age of Hong Kong, or at least since Ong Bak came out (Panna Rittikrai did the fight choreography).
Does watching a cute, pint-sized teenager beat the tar out dozens of knife wielding thugs sound like a good time at the movies to you? Yeah, me, too. Chocolate more than lives up to the promise of it’s hook.
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