Fighting Beat (2007)

[Drunk Monk]

This is a B grade indie Thai flick. A beach bar is run by an old Muay Thai coach. There’s some young guys and gals who run the bar capitalizing on tourists. They stage fights and let their customers win. An orphan is one of the workers and he lives in a Buddhist temple with an old monk who took him in when his father was killed. Then a Muay Thai gym wants to buy them out. This is being generous to the plot because it’s bare.

At first I was intriguing by its eye for Thailand. Beach bars with Muay Thai rings in the middle of the sand exist. Just like depicted, they are filed with dancing girls in shorts and bikini tops, slinging buckets of beer to crappy disco. And there’s Thai monks everywhere. And katooie lady boys. And stunning beaches. It wasn’t well written or acted (everyone seems amateur) but it did make me feel nostalgic for Thailand’s magic.

The early fights were lame but about halfway through, the choreo levels up. Basically they got a lot of yoked and cut Thai fighters to fight. And they got some moves. The fights have their charm, tucked in between flying elbows and knee kicks in a clinch. There’s some good stuff but it might be best to fast forward to the fights, because if you’ve not been to Thailand (and am I correct in assuming I’m the only DOOMer to get there so far?) the Thai take will do nothing for you. And the story is painfully cliche. It’s only about the fights.

I wish I had paid just a little more attention because IMDb tells me that Andrew Koji was in this. I interviewed him for Warrior but I didn’t notice him. There were a fair number of indistinguishable characters and towards the end I wasn’t tracking them so well because I just wasn’t that engaged. But I would’ve paid more attention to Koji because I like him. Unfortunately this movie is too small to find a synopsis online that tells me who he was.

No sword fight. Bar fights (Mano a Mano, broken bottles, random planks of wood and a heavy chain). Not DOOM recommended.