As a story, it's strictly generic fare — the young Ting (Tony Jaa) sets out to the big city after a sacred Buddha is stolen from his village. He quickly finds himself dealing with thugs. Fortunately, he's a skilled kickboxer. The elaborate, violent and often acrobatic action sequences that anchor Ong-Bak echo Bruce Lee a little more strongly than Jackie Chan; where Chan would go for physical comedy, Jaa opts to lay the motherfuckers out. That's not to say there's no humor here — one witty set piece represents the most elaborately choreographed stunt sequence I can think of that involves a hero who's trying to avoid a fight. But the general mood aspired to is fairly hard-boiled, with director Prachya Pinkaew nodding perfunctorily in the direction of the sordid with, for example, a disconcerting scene involving a forced drug overdose. So it's not as much fun as a great Jackie Chan movie, but at its best it’s similarly jaw-dropping. Finally, I would have sworn that wire work was involved in at least a couple of shots, but U.S. distributor Magnolia Pictures is swearing that it's all real, and I have no reason to doubt them. Which makes the achievement even more impressive. (Cue theoretical discussion about making critical judgments based on extra-textual information.)

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
Grade: C-

The critical rap on Sundance hit Napoleon Dynamite is that first-timer Jared Hess has directed himself some amalgamation of Welcome to the Dollhouse and Rushmore — extra points given to the Nowhere, Idaho, environs — to varying degrees of success. I don’t really buy that. As nerd movies go, Welcome to the Dollhouse gets value from its honesty about the emotional brutality of high-school peers and empathy for the geeky and needy Dawn Weiner, and while some reviewers have compared ND’s dry cinematic style to Wes Anderson’s stately widescreen tableaux, let’s just note that I could accurately describe some of Kevin Smith’s work as “deadpan” and it wouldn’t turn him into Jim fucking Jarmusch. Despite a few effective stabs at physical comedy that actually benefit from Hess’s directorial detachment, the excruciating Napoleon Dynamite has not much going for it in the realms of honesty and style. What it offers instead is a barely-there episodic narrative hitched to an unsubtle, goonish lead performance by Jon Heder, playing the kind of cartoonish mouth-breather you’d expect to be featured in a too-long sketch on Saturday Night Live, flanked by a supporting cast of camera-facing kids designated as weird by unfortunate clothing and/or hairstyle choices. (Everyone dresses like it’s 1982, which is apparently humorous.) None of them have any spark or passion, and Hess holds them in depressingly simplistic regard. So forget Solondz and Anderson; this is more like an R. Crumb comic with a PG rating — that is, all the grotesquerie and awkwardness with none of the bawdy joie de vivre, and what’s the point of that? Apparently, this really turns some people’s cranks, and Hess himself claims that it’s all semi-autobiographical. Fine. But as long as this kind of derivative and lazy comedy is considered some kind of hallmark of American independent filmmaking, well, God help us.

HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE
Grade: B

OK, this is more like it — an outsider comedy featuring ethnic types with actual personalities. Harold is a reserved, well-groomed Asian with a thankless job and a strong work ethic. Freewheeling Indian roommate Kumar is concerned mainly with putting off anything resembling his career (he has daddy issues). The narrative is a series of episodes involving a nighttime trip across the New Jersey landscape featuring the promise of sex, the threat of incarceration, car theft, casual racism, and really bad skin. Sure, it's hit-and-miss. But the laughs that roll in owe to the film's general rated-R fearlessness — it’s impossible to tell which loony direction it might veer in next. If you don't dig the scatological humor, maybe you'll go for the nudity (and vice versa). At one moment, the boys are riding a galloping, stoned cheetah through the Jersey woods. At another, they're picking up a hitchhiker who turns out to be Neil Patrick Harris (playing himself in a tour de force cameo). Their ultimate goal is nothing less all-American than a bag of tiny cheeseburgers. Underneath the stoner-comedy trappings, you feel a genuine sense of what it means to live in the melting pot and yet be pigeonholed on a maddening, near-random basis.