There is not much different about The Bodyguard 2. It’s pretty much the same movie as The Bodyguard. Petchthai Wongkamlao plays the same vaguely bumbling but inordinately skilled killing machine, Tony Jaa shows up in a very brief cameo making reference to The Protector before being told “wrong movie” and leaving, and the guy who played the silent Mexican wrestler in the first film plays a silent henchman in this one. Once again, the funniest dialogue in the movie comes during the final credits, where the guy who has been silent all movie gets into a screaming match (again) with Wongkamlao (also the director) over the fact that he once again had no lines.
The Jaa cameo, the shouting match over the closing credits and the vaguely stunned look on Wongkamlao’s face throughout the movie are once again the best parts. In this sequel, though, the plot is way different. Wongkamlao now exists not as a solitary bodyguard, but as an elite military man who spends a lot of time being mercilessly henpecked by his mean-spirited wife. He goes undercover with a music production company who are into some kind of shady illegal business in some way. It’s never really clear what that illegal business actually is, or what makes these people so bad, but all we need to know in a movie like this is that they are bad. And Wongkamlao is good.
His “undercover” assignment leads him to become, bizarrely, the most popular pop star in Thailand. Now, I have no idea how funny these scenes are in Thai. But in English (once again, watch this movie with subtitles and not with the dubbing), the songs are hilarious. They make about as little sense as the actual plot does, he appears to be a terrible singer (although the music is a little atonal, and I don’t know if that is the style in Thailand. Maybe it’s supposed to sound like that. I hope not.) The whole pop-star thing just makes the movie Bigger and More Ridiculous and Sillier than the first one, and I like that just fine.
Oh - and I thought I ought to mention, because the kids loved it too - this movie features the all-time greatest board-smashing-a-shin scene of all time. And, I know, I can’t think of another one in another movie either. But it’s awesome, so I thought I would put that in.
