Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Power Kids Blu-ray Movie Review

Ong Bak meets Kick Ass, only, not as good as you might imagine that pairing to be.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater June 1, 2010

First off, Power Kids isn’t exactly a kid’s flick. Well, maybe in its native Thailand it is, but here in the good old U.S. of A, we don’t generally like our children’s movies to feature armed-to-the-teeth terrorists mowing down hostages at a hospital. Stateside, in movies aimed squarely at the under-12 set, you won’t usually find exploding, blood-filled squibs, vicious kicks to the face, or copious amounts of swearing. That said, if I were ten years old, I’m pretty sure I would think Power Kids was totally awesome, and I would probably go around for days trying to elbow drop my brother and do flips over the living room couch, all while cursing like a piss-drunk sailor on shore leave. So, parents be forewarned: Power Kids isn’t Spy Kids or Shark Boy and Lava Girl. The violence is much more brutal, the tone is more realistic—as realistic as a film about a group of kids foiling a terrorist plot can be—and, well, it is rated R for a reason.

While the violent action and ridiculous premise make Power Kids a contender for cult classic status, the film is felled by two elements that are, in fact, usual culprits in movies for children: a cloying story, run through with clichés, and child actors that overplay every emotion the script requires. The film begins at Master Lek’s (Arunya Pawilai) Muy Thai boxing school, where four youngsters with nascent martial arts talents have been sent to train. Life isn’t easy for these pugilistic youths—they get smacked across the backside with a cane when they foul up, they yearn for remote controlled cars they can’t afford, and the youngest of them, Woon, is saddled with a debilitating heart condition. Here’s the eye-welling kicker: Woon finally gets the R/C car he’s been eyeing, but after a run-in with some racing rivals, he falls to the pavement in horrifying slo-mo, clutching his chest. He needs an emergency transplant—stat!—and fortunately, a recently deceased kid, newly pulled off of life support, has the perfect donor heart. Unfortunately, the heart is on ice in a hospital a few hours away, a hospital that just so happens to have been taken over by a terrorist group that has the place on lock-down. So, naturally, the rest of the kids hitchhike to the hospital, intent on beating some serious ass and getting that heart.

Produced by Baa-Ram-Ewe, the Thai production company that brought us the skull-crushing Tony Jaa beat-em-ups Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong, Power Kids serves up the same kind of high-flying, fists-and-feet of fury violence that we’ve come to expect from Thai action cinema. Only, here, it’s a gang of pint-sized warriors doling out the hardcore beatdowns. The kids reportedly had to train for two years for their roles, and it shows; the stunt work may not be as intense or perilously gymnastic as the stuff Jaa pulls off, but these kids have serious chops, some serious chops indeed. They go flying head-first through plate glass windows, wield florescent lights like samurai swords, and run up walls, doing backflips and knee-dropping onto the laid-out bad guys below. The head of the terrorist group is played by well-known international stunt man/martial artist Johnny Nguyen—who has worked on Windtalkers and the first two Spiderman films—and the kids have no trouble matching him kick for kick. In one of the film’s best sequences, two of the kids fight Nguyen in a tight hallway, vaulting from wall to wall, darting under, around, and over him, and landing some brutal blows. There are plenty of antics here that you wouldn’t ever want your own progeny to imitate, like when the kids strap lengths of pipe to their forearms to take down a hulking, meat-headed (and drunk) American. Perhaps the most painful move in the film is the dreaded kancho. When I taught English in Japan, the kancho was the stuff of lore; everyone knew someone who had fallen prey. Basically, a kancho is when some punk-ass junior high school kid clasps his hands together, making a gun shape—with the first two fingers on each hand extended—and then rams said fingers as hard as he can into your bum-hole/taint area. Not pleasant.

Anyway, if you let your kids watch Power Kids, just remember that I warned you, and don’t come crying to me if, or more likely, when they pick up on the kancho. I leave this to your discretion, as it’s honestly difficult to judge who Power Kids’ intended audience is supposed to be. This isn’t hard-R material, but it’s definitely way beyond the thresholds of violence and language you’d find in, say, a Disney/Pixar production. (If, however, your kids are playing Grand Theft Auto IV or Modern Warfare 2, they’ve already seen far worse.) At the same time, it’s so kid-centric and thematically lightweight that most adults will have trouble taking it seriously. (And, for the most part, the film does take itself seriously. There’s no wink-wink irony to be found.) The whole dying-kid-needs-a-new-heart scenario is handled with unbelievable mawkishness, and the kid in question plays it with an almost farcically earnest puppy-dog-eyed dignity. The child actors have undeniable and genuinely impressive martial arts skills, but you’ve seen better acting in your own kid’s third-grade production of Peter Pan. It seems, then, that those who will get the most enjoyment out of Power Kids are either pre-teens whose parents are cool with uber-violent content, or adults who get an ironic kick out of the absurdity of the film’s premise.

Power Kids Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

It's obvious from the start that Power Kids is a much lower budgeted production than some of the other Thai imports we've gotten recently, like Ong Bak 2 or Legend of the Tsunami Warrior. I haven't been able to verify, but it looks to me like the film was shot on 16mm, as the 1080p/AVC-encoded image has a softer, grainier look than you'd expect from 35mm. It's all still noticeably high definition, but the picture lacks fine detail—skin and clothing texture, for instance— even in tight close-ups. Longer shots, then, have an especially undefined quality. It's also clear that the film didn't undergo much color correction in post. During many of the outdoor scenes, black levels are hazy, colors look washed out and overexposed—the remote control car race, in particular, looks terrible—and the indoor sequences don't fare much better, with lifeless hues and an overly cool white balance. The film sits on a 25 GB disc, but aside from some occasionally splotchy colors and a bit of noise, there aren't really any distracting compression problems. I like to cut low-budget films some slack in the picture quality department—this is probably the best Power Kids is ever going to look—so just make sure you lower your expectations accordingly.

Power Kids Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Magnolia Home Entertainment likes to bundle its import releases with two lossless audio tracks, an English dub and an original language mix, and Power Kids is no exception. The dub is unsurprisingly awful—the kids doing the English voiceovers ham it up even more than their Thai counterparts already do—but if you're looking for a good laugh, have at it. I opted to watch the film with the Thai DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track as accompaniment, and like the picture quality, the sound definitely shows its low-budget origins. There's a commendable attempt at crafting some immersive audio action—machine gun fire pinging through the rears, remote control cars zipping cross-channel, crickets singing at night—but it's all somewhat lo-fi and unsubtle. The dialogue is also inconsistent, sometimes seeming perfectly balanced and other times sounding slightly muffled or low. The music, at least, has some kick, not to mention a strange 1980s vibe, making the whole film feel like some long-lost Thai made-for-TV relic, something you'd have watched in '85 between episodes of The A-Team and MacGuyver.

Power Kids Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Making of Power Kids (SD, 8:41)
A straightforward making of documentary, featuring clips from the film, b-roll footage, and interviews with director Kridsanapong Radchata and most of the child actors.

Behind the Scenes Footage (SD, 4:38)
A mix of outtakes, stunt work, and injuries. But mostly injuries.

Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment (1080p, 6:19)
Includes trailers for The Warlords, Red Cliff, and District 13: Ultimatum, along with a promo for HDNet.

Power Kids Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Power Kids is one of those films that you'll either love (especially if you ironically venerate crappy martial arts movies) or feel almost completely ambivalent towards. Too hardcore for kids and too lightweight for adults, it occupies a strange cinematic nether region. For those interested, a rental is probably a safe bet.