The “spectacular” 2008 movie so good it ruined one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite genres: “You’ll never do it as good”
Every now and then, a movie comes along that’s so good it ruins a genre forever, because it sets a benchmark that can’t be beaten. When the credits started rolling on one of them, Quentin Tarantino was hit with the sobering realisation that one of his favourite forms of cinema had been ruined forever.
It doesn’t happen often, but there are more than a few titles that become known as perennial party-poopers. Steven Spielberg has done it twice, because unless something remarkable happens, there’ll never be a better shark flick than Jaws or a superior dinosaur adventure to Jurassic Park.
Star Wars may not be the greatest sci-fi film of all time, but as far as space operas go, it’s the king. Every gangster epic will continue to live in the shadow of The Godfather, single-location actioners can’t escape Die Hard, the dark and gritty reboot will never be as dark and gritty as when Christopher Nolan did it, and as far as claustrophobic horror goes, dislodging Ridley Scott’s Alien will take some doing.
Tarantino knows what that’s like, and he almost literally wrote the book on it, with every second independent picture emerging from the United States in the 1990s feeling like a blatant Pulp Fiction rip-off, with nonlinear timelines, pop culture references, and needle-drops becoming the order of the day.
However, as a lifelong lover of the humble martial arts movie, he was left with a serious case of mixed emotions when he saw director Prachya Pinkaew’s 2008 bone-cruncher, Chocolate, for the first time. In short, it’s a film about a teenage girl kicking ass, but what ass she kicks, with stunt choreographer Panna Rittikrai’s work a thing of beauty.
Star Yanin Vismitananda was discovered by Pinkaew several years before production started, and she spent that time honing her skills to the point where Tarantino could only marvel at how her performance culminated in “stuntmen getting fucked up left, right, and centre in the most spectacular ways.”
“This has some of the greatest kung fu fights I’ve ever seen, all put in one movie,” the two-time Academy Award winner elaborated. “Each of the big, giant fights keep topping the last one in a way that you almost can’t believe. It’s such a great fight film. Fight films have been some of my favourite movies ever. It ruined me on fight films. I wasn’t interested in seeing any new fight films for the whole rest of the decade.”
As far as Tarantino was concerned, any new fight flick he watched afterwards would only pale in comparison, because, in his own words, “You’ll never do it as good as Chocolate.” He still saw a few of them, but as he expected, none of them was a patch on the dizzying ballet of violence brought to the table by Vismitananda’s Zen.
It was good enough to be named as one of the filmmaker’s favourite features of the 21st century, but it’s up for debate whether the fight genre peaked with Chocolate, especially when things like The Raid, The Night Comes for Us, and The Furious are on an even keel, even if they’re not universally lauded as superior.
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