Summary
Ziam boasts lots of solid, messy action, and the concept of fighting off a zombie apocalypse with Muay Thai is a fun idea in a simple, lizard-brain sort of way. But the undead remain uninteresting antagonists, and the plot and characters are both predictably thin.
Even if it wasn’t my job, I’d still find myself watching a movie like Ziam. As played out as zombies might be these days, the elevator pitch of “one-man army takes on the undead with Muay Thai” is too funny to ignore. Not that this is a funny movie, of course; it’s aggressively bleak, violent, gory, and ultimately quite tragic. But you won’t care much, since like most zombie media, the characters and plot aren’t really the point, and thus aren’t developed beyond the loose outline necessary to justify smacking a zombie’s mushy head in like Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak.
There’s nothing wrong with that in theory. There are plenty of movies – The Raid, for instance – that are so good at providing the facile, surface-level pleasures that there’s really no need for anything else. But while the action and gore of Ziam are fun, they’re not that fun, not enough to excuse a complete absence of basically anything else.
I’ll tell you what, though – Muay Thai and zombies are a surprisingly decent fit. The twisting strains of DNA here make for a fun hybrid of prominent influences, cribbing everything from the action choreography to the design of the zombies to the staging of the set-pieces from all kinds of different sources. Director Kulp Kaljareuk borrows liberally, not in a way that feels like plagiarism, but more like loving, enthusiastic homage. But the over-familiarity of Ziam turns out to be its undoing, especially when it becomes clear, after some vague narrative setup and a few grisly scenes of zombie horror, that it isn’t interested in bringing anything new to the table.
The setup can be summarised this simply: Singh (Mark Prin Suparat) has to fight his way through a hospital, which has become ground zero in a zombie outbreak, to rescue his love, Rin (Nychaa Nuttanicha). That’s genuinely it. Sure, there’s the interesting wrinkle that the world was already ruined before the zombies arrived, thanks to the usual reasons – melting ice caps releasing long-dormant bacteria, killing off all the fish, impacting the food chain, and causing global famine. But this is all handled in a neat and tidy text preamble and barely factors into the story.
The bad guys who aren’t zombies are, of course, the wealthy and powerful who have taken totalitarian control of Thailand and privatised basic survival necessities, and needless to say, the outbreak is entirely their fault, but this isn’t addressed much either. The entire narrative framework is a little murky, to be honest, and you can tell that no real effort was expended on making it matter to the A-B plot. It speaks to a confidence in Ziam’s action that is unsurprising but, ultimately, a little misguided.
This is because the action in Ziam is good, which isn’t enough. It’d have to be of an extremely high standard, or paced as a relentless non-stop thrill ride, in order to paper over the gaps left by a hand-wavey premise that doesn’t lay out coherent rules for its origins or its infected. That kind of thing sounds like nitpicking, but it’s important in making the so-called emotional character moments really sing. For how much time Ziam spends on scenes that you can tell you’re supposed to care about, it’s surprising how little effort it expends on trying to make you care about them.
Singh suffers particularly on the character front, since he has no real personality at all beyond being good at fighting. Luckily, he’s good enough at fighting that you’ll want him to succeed just to see how he decides to stove in the next necrotic skull. The hospital setting proves to be a rich bounty of brain-splattering props, and Singh makes enthusiastic use of them all. This isn’t a Timo Tjahjanto movie, don’t get me wrong, but it’s along the same lines as something like The Shadow Strays, just lesser in those key areas of truly gonzo bloodletting.
You could perhaps make the argument that this is more the fault of zombies in general than this movie specifically, but it wouldn’t hold much water given how risk-averse Ziam is overall. These zombies are interesting enough – they can sprint around and get steadily more horrific-looking as things go – but they’re still fundamentally zombies. At one point, another character helpfully explains that Singh needs to destroy the brain, and really, what else do you need to know? It’s probably telling that the few scenes in which Singh has cause to fight another human are generally better and more engaging than the zombie ones. And that’s kind of an issue in a zombie-action movie.
But don’t let me put you off. Ziam is both depth and risk-averse and doesn’t have the kind of genre-defining action it’d really need to excuse those things. But as I intimated at the top, it is fun to see someone Muay Thai zombies to a second death, and that’s the vast majority of the movie. Mileage may vary, and expectations should be tempered, but if you go in with the right attitude, you’ll probably have a pretty good time.
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