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Fireball
A bizarre hybrid of Baseketball and
Kickboxer, Fireball revolves around a deadly new game
sweeping the world of Bangkok’s organised crime syndicates. The sport
in question fuses basketball with Muay Thai and mixed martial arts, with
the only real rules being that once the whistle blows each team must
beat the living shite out of each other, and the first to score a basket
wins. Death is not uncommon, in fact it’s desirable, as the fewer men
left standing the more cash they’ll have when the winnings are divided.
And that, in a nutshell, is that. The rest
of the plot and characterisations are largely redundant; you either want
to watch a bloody combination of Royal Rumble and a backyard game of
roundball or you don’t. It doesn’t really matter that lead character
Tai (Preeti Barameeanat) is playing in order to win money for his
comatose twin brother Tan, who was beaten unconscious in a game of
Fireball trying to win the requisite funds to pay off the bribes needed
to free his brother from prison. Does that sentence even make sense? I
don’t know, I just watched a movie that was a cross between Hoop
Dreams and Fight Club. I never thought I’d say that.
This movie is guaranteed to leave you
equally delirious, or at the very least perplexed. The premise is so
strange, the back stories so superfluous, the gangster cliches so
risible (‘You don’t like my way of doing things? Then get the fuck outta
here, and good luck finding another nefarious criminal willing to loan
you money’) that it makes it difficult to really immerse yourself in the
plot, such as it is. What I did like about the film were a natural
performance by actress Khanutra Chuchuaysuwan as Tan’s comely squeeze
Pang, the welcome intensity of Barameeanat, which keeps things from
descending totally into farce, and some interesting and truly arresting
shots of Bangkok’s literal underbelly; the shady goings-on underneath
the buzzing highways, the seedy gangster bars, the wild dogs roaming the
streets, the endless sprawl of cheap concrete apartment blocks.
Ultimately however the bad outweighs the good, and despite the best
efforts of director Thanakorn Pongsuwan Fireball couldn’t be said
to be anything approaching essential viewing. It isn’t much of a sports
movie, and isn’t quite a martial arts film either. In fact, I’m not
sure what the hell it is. Cool title though.
Audio & Video
Fireball has been badly and
unconvincingly dubbed into English, and accordingly features both a bad
DD 5.1 surround English soundtrack and an unconvincing DTS English 5.1
surround mix. Thankfully however there is the redeeming presence of a
Thai two-channel audio track, which is up to par. Considering one of
the joys of watching a foreign film is watching that film in its
original language, and not poorly dubbed by voice actors standing in an
irritatingly resonant recording booth, this would seem a paltry
compromise. Picture quality is fairly strong, though for some reason
the film looks as though it’s been overexposed or run through a faint
sepia filter. Or has had similar effects applied digitally. It worked
well in Traffic, but I’m not sure what the purpose was of
employing a slightly monochrome palette here.
Special Features
A 12-minute Making Of, which contains
interviews with the film’s animated Director Pongsuwan, snippets of
dubbed footage from the film, and not much else of note. |
