Nobody watched the first Ong-bak movie for its story, and on the evidence here, its star Tony Jaa knows that only too well. Titling his directorial debut Ong-bak 2, the martial arts superstar from Thailand presents us with a story that has no relation whatsoever with the original: Tien (Jaa) is the son of a military commander, out to avenge his parents’ murders in the Ayutthaya Kingdom of 15th century Thailand. Barely avoiding a life in slavery, Tien is adopted by a camp of bandits, taught martial arts, and groomed as their new leader.

With the two films set more than half a millennium apart, Jaa’s nastier and bloodier sequel shares more similarities with Mel Gibson’s primitive blood fest Apocalypto than the old-school kung fu flicks that the first film (directed by Prachya Pinkaew) so exhilaratingly recalled. Abandoning the original’s frenetic humour and urban setting, and instead dwelling principally on depressing subjects as betrayal, revenge and the irony of fate, Jaa’s action fiesta begins as a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, then stumbles awkwardly from one fight scene to the next – making progressively less narrative sense each time – and finally cops out with an ending that is too preposterous to even bother explaining.

As Jaa fights the cartoonish villains, fans of the star may be disappointed with his preference for sword fights over hand-to-hand combat. While the earlier film now stands as a stunning accomplishment of no-CG, no-wire action, Ong-bak 2 is merely a spectacle of nonstop, and dare we say it, humdrum, throat slashing. Edmund Lee