Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bangkok Breaking: Heaven and Hell’ on Netflix, a Manic, Action-packed Spinoff of the Thai Series

There was no second season of Thai action series Bangkok Breaking , but feature-length followup Bangkok Breaking: Heaven and Hell (now on Netflix) feels a lot like writer-director Kome Kongkiat Komesiri might’ve trimmed and streamlined a handful of episodes into one dense, meaty story. The film brings back Sukollawat Kanarot, who revisits his beleaguered character from the series, an EMT who finds himself in the thick of the type of danger that involves car chases and car wrecks and brawls and shooting and criminals and cops and kidnappings and all that, death included, of course. Will he survive this convoluted adventure, and live to drive his ambulance again? Maybe. Depends on how many people stream it, I guess.

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The Gist: For eight months, Bangkok’s Raumjai Community Housing project has been engulfed in turmoil. Its population is primarily poor people and criminals, none of whom reacted kindly to the government selling the property to foreign interests who aim to gentrify the living shit out of it. Riots erupted, and residents dug in for a siege. “I’ll die here!” they chant, as riot police line up with batons and helmets and shields. It’s tense. It’s a pressure cooker. It’s a powder keg. It’s an atomic bomb, just waiting to go off. Suddenly, a shot rings out. Snipers start picking off Raumjai residents. All hell breaks loose. Blood flies, bullets rip through flesh, grenades remove appendages from bodies. A standoff has become a massacre.

On the fringe of the violence, a group of EMTs stands. Bullets zinging around them, they rush in to staunch wounds and load the wounded into ambulances. They’re told to get the hell out of there, but Wanchai (Kanarot) defies orders and dashes out to save another poor soul. As the leader of his team, it costs him his job, and soon he’s buzzing through the city on a scooter, delivering food. He schleps to the hospital with a bubble tea for Mei (Atitaya Tribudarak, aka singer Mind 4EVE), and this is about when we meet the guys who are going to implicate them in some dangerous bullshit, weathered hired goon/killer Sin (Doo-Sanya Kunakorn) and his weaselly nephew Bank (Teerapat Lohanan). These guys are trouble, sure, but we’ll eventually meet guys who are more trouble, and more guys who are even more trouble than that. It gets pretty deep.

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Anyway, what with one thing and another, Sin takes a bullet and he and Bank hijack an ambulance with Wanchai at the wheel and Mei, a very green nurse who’s been an intern for a week, in the back. She has to jab a plastic valve to relieve the pressure in Sin’s lung so he doesn’t die, and I only mention that because it’s a plot device we’ll revisit more than once in the next couple hours. Wanchai and Mei witnessed Sin and Bank abduct a little girl who belongs to people with a lot of money, and now our protags are implicated. Implicated as hell . Wanchai guns the ambulance into Raumjai, which is like a mini city of its own, lorded over by scumlord drug lords like Darlie (Day Thaitanium), who has a more than sufficient supply of ammunition, goons and face tats. Our core characters hereby play cat-and-mouse games throughout Raumjai, e.g., the girl is lost and then found and then lost again and taken and hardly anybody does anything that isn’t at gunpoint or under some threat of untimely painful death, with much of the action folding in a bevy of characters with conflicting interests, ranging from the head of the little girl’s family’s security team to a black-market dealer who sells organs from freshly deceased bodies. It’s all such a bloody, bloody mess.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Raid 2 comes to mind, being an ambitious and elaborately staged action film that goes on way longer than it probably should. Otherwise, Heaven and Hell dips into similar waters as Michael Bay’s Ambulance and French action-thriller Athena , which is better known as The Best Film of 2022. Please note: Heaven and Hell does not reach the heights of artistry as these other films. Yes, even Ambulance , which drove me nuts.

Performance Worth Watching: This here category implies that there are actual characters to play in this film. There’s roughly three-quarters of one in Wanchai, so we’ll give the accolade to Praisoong for maintaining his good-guy sincerity and stalwart heart throughout this mad, mad narrative.

Memorable Dialogue: Mei tries to get out of helping the crooks with their injuries: “I’m not a nurse, I’m a model! I’m cosplaying!”

Sex and Skin: No time for any of that .

Our Take: One hundred and forty-seven minutes. That’s a one followed by a four and a seven. Just to be clear. And yes, I’m implying that Bangkok Breaking: Heaven and Hell is far too lengthy for its own good, diagnosis: Too Many Characters Syndrome and Overambitiousness-24. The film will wear you out and wear you down with its endless barrage of guns and motorcycles and greasy villains and drone shots and general uptempo madness. Komesiri seems to be inspired by vintage Hong Kong cinema, specifically its frenetic, hyperdynamic action. But Heaven and Hell doesn’t lean into its anti-logical nonsense enough to put it over the top into winking, gonzo entertainment. It’s just loud and complicated and noisy.

Now, an argument can be made that the plot isn’t worth the effort, so we should just kick back and enjoy the action. I tried that, and it worked for a while, and Komesiri fully commits to building the world inside Raumjai, an actual set and not a green screen monstrosity, complete with creatively designed interiors and exteriors. It’s easy to appreciate the tactility of the setting, but tougher to get over the action’s frequent CGI enhancements, with its rampant and obviously digital flames and explosions (an image of a wild pig running through a courtyard while on fire should be more visually searing, but all we can think of is how it’s just a real pig trailing ones and zeros). It’s even tougher to feel a sense of agency and investment in the story, which fails to produce an emotion or character arc that doesn’t feel tossed-off and manufactured, devices upon which to build complex action set pieces that are competent, but never transcendent. Those invested in the Bangkok Breaking series may find more traction here, but the rest of us will just be left exhausted.

Our Call: Needs a little more heaven, a little less hell. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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