Rating: C+
Dir: Xavier Gens
Star: Nassim Lyes, Olivier Gourmet, Loryn Nounay, Vithaya Pansringarm
a.k.a. Farang
When you have an exclamation point in your title, I feel this creates certain expectations, and you’d better deliver. Them! lives up to its title, and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! justifies all three of its bangs. Oklahoma! – not so much. In the film’s defense, this title was changed for the English-speaking market. The original name is the derogatory Thai term for a foreigner, and it came without any extraneous punctuation. Does it deserve its exclamation point? No, outside of a roughly two-minute spell, which we’ll get to later. I could perhaps be talked into… I dunno, maybe a semicolon? If they wanted to be fancy, maybe they should have gone with something like MæÿhèΜ.
The hero is Sam (Lyes), a former prisoner who kills an associate. That it was in self-defense, wouldn’t help his case, so he heads to Thailand and starts a new life. He has a wife, Mia (Nounay), a stepdaughter, a legitimate job with airport access and a semi-legitimate side hustle in Thai boxing. Mia wants to buy land on the beach and build a restaurant, so Sam agrees to do a job for sleazy crime-boss Narong (Gourmet). Naturally, it goes wrong. In retaliation, one family member is killed, another is kidnapped and Sam is left for dead. Key words: “left for”. You will not be surprised to learn Sam does not take kindly to the situation, vowing to rescue the kidnappee, and make Narong pay.
Indeed, it’s all thoroughly obvious. From the moment you see Sam interacting with Mia and his daughter, who is so adorable, she needs to be available in plush, it’s clear they are too damn happy. Something bad will happen: the only uncertainty is in the specifics. The problem is, it takes the film 45 minutes to get there. By which point the audience are looking up lists of other movies which had exclamation points in their names. There’s then the nursing back to health, and the tracking down of Narong’s associates, before we reach anything much close to what the title straightforwardly promises. All this faffing around is adequately handled, yet not well enough done to overcome the painfully obvious nature.
The fights are decent to decent-plus. It doesn’t shy away from brutality, and Sam is refreshingly gender-neutral in his application of it, destroying men and women, in a true demonstration of equality in (literal) action. However, there is only one truly standout sequence, when Sam has to take on a number of Narong’s minions in a freight elevator (top). It starts off rough, and gradually yet relentlessly escalates, to the point where people are using weapons which have been driven through their limbs against each other. It’s not just mayhem, it’s mayhem! I did wonder where this superbly inventive cruelty, which verges on a martial arts version of body horror, went to during the rest of the movie. If it had been consistently present, then multiple exclamation points could have been justified. Possibly even an interrobang or two.