by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

What Indian cinema is to dance choreography and Sweden’s is to dysfunctional family fun, Chinese film is to martial arts—the leading source, the go-to guys, the undisputed kings. Undisputed, that is, until recently. As China turns to majestic, mythological silk ’n’ swordplay epics full of fantastical flights of fancy, the old-school style of kung-fu movie—the broad, dumb, meat-’n’-potatoes action flick in which the battered stuntmen are the true stars—is all but extinct. Fortunately, Thailand has been picking up the slack in that field, with spectacular results. (They’ve also been fucking the corpse of the played-out, post-Ringu Asian horror wave, but much less impressively.)

With storylines calibrated to the comprehension of seven-year-olds, and morality and motivations etched in the highest contrast of black and white, there’s no mistaking Thailand’s fight flicks for great works of cinematic art. But for eye-popping, jaw-dropping ass-kick-robatics, Thailand and its masters of muay thai kickboxing are on top these days, a position established by the success of 2003’s astounding Ong-bak.

Last year’s Tom Yum Goong, released here now as The Protector, has been mislabeled as Ong-bak 2 on shadier Chinatown bootlegs—inaccurate, but not entirely off the mark. The synopsis is comparable: miscreants steal a Thai village’s ancestral treasure (a golden Buddha in Ong-bak, elephants this time), the naïve smalltown boy with serious muay thai skills sets out to retrieve it, total mayhem ensues. Moreover, The Protector reunites the quintessential quartet of the genre, which is director Prachya Pinkaew, stunt and fight choreographer Panna Rittikrai, comic sidekick Petchtai Wongkamlao and of course the star, 30-year-old Tony Jaa, whose name now ranks with Sonny Chiba’s, Jackie Chan’s and Jet Li’s (Bruce Lee’s residing on a whole higher plane, of course).

The Protector has its disappointments. By the second act, the fascinating backdrop of rural Thailand is replaced by mundane downtown Sydney, Australia. The main villain is a bitter transsexual, which seems rather retrogressive (I’ll leave it to the ladyboys to populate the picket lines, though). Funnyman Wongkamlao’s comic skills are literally lost in translation as he plays a lovably corrupt ethnic-Thai cop, and don’t get me started on his quick jaunt on a Segway—haven’t seen one of those since Snoop Dogg went a-pimpin’ on one in that Boss Playa movie of his.

The upsides, however, totally outnumber the sour notes. Rittikrai merits a Nobel Prize for the pains he has taken (and subjected his stuntmen to) in concocting his inventive and electrifying fight scenes, including an orgy of broken bad-guy bones as Jaa snaps the limbs of literally dozens of henchman types (the sound mix at that point is like a bowl of Rice Krispies miked and amplified to the max). Then there’s the uninterrupted five-minute take of Jaa fighting his way up a half-dozen storeys of wide, winding staircase in the evildoers’ lair, unquestionably the film’s money shot. Rittikrai offered a similar nod to the famous no-cut sequence in John Woo’s Hard Boiled in his 2004 directorial outing Born to Fight, but this one arguably tops both.

The finest moments in The Protector, though, truly belong to Jaa. They’re split-second visions—Jaa flying knees-first off a stairwell into a gaggle of goons, or smashing a streetlight out with a running flip-kick—but they pack the same kind of compressed wow factor that Jackie and Jet once delivered.

The Protector opens Friday, Sept. 8

>> Movie Listings