Keep in mind: Here’s a star who first dazzled audiences simply by evading-and, okay, occasionally kicking-attackers in an alleyway in Ong-Bak, so an increase in scale (and plotting) isn’t certain to serve him well. Working again with director Prachya Pinkaew, who made his 2005 hit Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior and the first Protector movie, Jaa has to go bigger, as sequels demand, but he isn’t necessarily better for it. And with a physical talent as sensational as Jaa, a thin pretext is plenty.

That might not seem like the most active of 21st-century jobs, but it’s enough of a pretext for Jaa to square off against powerful elephant-nappers worldwide. As Kham, a generally sweet-natured Muay Thai master, Jaa belongs to a long tradition of Jaturungkabart-men who protect the royal war elephants from poachers and enemies of the state. In the immortally stilted words of Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.” Replace “chew bubblegum” with “frolic with a majestic elephant,” and “kick ass” with “break the arms of everyone in this room,” and that’s more or less what dazzling Thai martial-arts star Tony Jaa does in The Protector and The Protector 2.

The protector 2