Goddamn, this movie was awful, brehs.
A decent copy of the movie leaked like a month ago, and the fact I hadn't heard anyone about it already made me beware when I found out. But it was even worse than I could've imagined. Forget about the plot and the acting, we all know it's trash and doesn't matter but the fights, brehs... they completely and utterly ruined the fights.
Every action scene is loaded with awful CGI, and when I say awful, I mean they had one guy doing the effects in a bootleg copy of Adobe After Effects.
Remember how in the first movie all the stunts felt raw and real? Here they're all corny gimmicks, like a terrible CGI firewall that Jaa uses to jump off and kick enemies in the head with fire feet. At one point he's standing with wet shoes on a train track, and the guy he's fighting also gets his shoes wet and steps on the other side of the train tracks, so every time they punch they give off electric shocks, with lightsaber sound effects.
The big bad is RZA and although he isn't bad, it's ridiculous how much they gotta handicap Jaa to make him seem like a legitimate threat. And by handicap I mean he's forced to hold onto his elephant's tusks (so he literally can't fight back) because RZA has rigged the tusks with bombs that go off when removed.
Worst of all is that the queen JeeJa Yanin is completely wasted. In every fight she gets her ass kicked, whether she's fighting a big threat or a henchman, they all beat her down. Every fight you hope she finally gets to shine like she did in Chocolate only to see her receive another ass whooping. I was sitting there wondering how the hell they could allow her to look so weak on some
"Throw the damn towel!" shyt.
In the end the movie left me like

. If it weren't for The Raid 2 I would nearly lose my faith in the martial arts genre after this abomination.