THE PROTECTOR
R, 84 minutes

“The Protector” is the second movie from the team that brought us the joint-cracking Thai action movie, “Ong Bak.” There’s director Prachya Pinkaew, action choreographer Panna Rittikrai, and short but savage star, Tony Jaa. But I couldn’t find the most important credit anywhere: the editor who took a 109 minute movie called “Tom Yum Goong” that wasn’t very good to start with and turned it into an 84 minute mess called “The Protector.”

The original “Tom Yum Goong” was widely pilloried by Asian critics and could have stood some recutting, but after the French sales company removed 15 minutes and the Weinstein Company removed a further 10, what remains is totally incomprehensible.

Mr. Jaa reprises his role as a young man who comes to the big city (last time Bangkok, this time Sydney) to retrieve something from his village that materialistic bad guys have stolen (last time a Buddha’s head, this time a baby elephant). There he spends his time kicking people. He kicks them in a warehouse, he kicks them on the street, and he kicks them in a breathless four-minute shot in a Guggenheim-inspired restaurant. Thanks to the new editing, pivotal characters appear with no introduction and then disappear with no explanation.

But is the action any good? While some of sequences seem to have been re-edited, making them choppier than they should be, the underlying fact is that no one is very good at choreographing Mr. Jaa. His opponents stand in line and obligingly attack him one by one, making his fights against waves of baddies a bit like watching a chiropractor clear out his waiting room. Couple this with the fact that Mr. Jaa has no discernible screen presence and you come out of “The Protector” feeling like one of his stuntmen: sore, short-changed, and with your head pounding.

— Grady Hendrix

Also Opening This Week

MAN PUSH CART
Unrated, 87 minutes

In “Man Push Cart,” opening tonight at the Angelika, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a Pakistani immigrant, struggles to drag his heavy cart every night to his corner in Midtown Manhattan. And every morning, from inside the cart, he sells coffee and donuts to a city he cannot call his own. He is the worker found on every street corner in every city, a solitary man who wonders if he will ever escape his fate.

THE COVENANT
PG-13, 87 minutes

This thriller tells the story of the Sons of Ipswich, four young students at an elite academy who are bound by their sacred ancestry. As descendants of the original families who settled in Ipswich Colony in the 1600s, the boys were born with special powers. When the body of a dead student is discovered, secrets begin to unravel which threaten to break the covenant of silence that has protected their families for centuries.

I TRUST YOU TO KILL ME
R, 95 minutes

Kiefer Sutherland takes his indie record label act, Rocco DeLuca & the Burden, on their first international tour. This rockumentary film chronicles a personal journey of a rock band and their less than qualified road manager (Mr. Sutherland) and shows the hopes, successes, and disappointments of a band trying to get their music to their audience.