NYAFF 2010: Tickets to Power Kids given away

I have already given away two pairs of tickets to Power Kids at the New York Asian Film Festival.

To the two winners, the festival will have the tickets waiting for you at the box office.

The pint-sized, ass-kicking cousins of Tony Jaa, Power Kids is about a group of children from a Muay Thai school who have to fight terrorists who've taken over a hospital in order to retrieve a heart to save their dying friend. It's also known as Force of Five as well as Haa Hua Jai Heroes (5 หัวใจฮีโร่, literally "five heroes for the heart"),

If you're tired of flying double knee drops and elbow punches or bored at the prospect of seeing Vietnamese martial-arts star Johnny Nguyen throw a kid through a plate-glass window and get his head kicked in, then don't bother with this movie.

Here's more from festival:

To trace the downfall of Western civilization, look no further than the sad state of our children's entertainment. Sure, Nickelodeon can claim commercial success, but when international terrorists come to your house to kill your parents, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody is not going to help little Johnny nut up. Here at NYAFF, we believe the children are our future; teach them well, and let them lead the way ... with a flying knee to the face.

If you miss the days when movies could beat kids like rented mules then let them give it back as good as they got, look no further than Power Kids, the first tween-friendly product of the Thai hit factory behind Ong-Bak and Chocolate.

Wut, Kat, Jib, and wisecracking Pong are living an idyllic life at their Muay Thai school in Bangkok, racing toy cars and beating the crap out of obnoxious Western tourists. But when a friend needs a new heart and the only one available is inside a hijacked hospital, our young heroes must band together in the spirit of friendship to kick terrorist ass, facing off against The Rebel's Johnny Tri Nguyen and kicking hapless stuntmen in the junk until they piss blood (no, seriously).

Don't look for any fancy jump-cuts cheating the action; these moppets can take some serious punishment. That really is a kickboxing 11-year-old girl going face first through plate glass as Johnny Nguyen beats his pint-sized nemeses with laptops, hurls them off mezzanines, peppers them with machine gun fire and goes toe-to-toe with a boy not old enough to shave. Cracking skulls, ripping the plumbing out of the walls and immolating bad guys with Molotov cocktails, the Power Kids are the mutant love children of Die Hard and Bugsy Malone.

Power Kids is playing on July 3, in the IFC Center@Midnight slot.

Raging Phoenix, starring Chocolate martial-arts heroine Jija Yanin in a sick mashup of B-boy breakdancing moves and drunken Muay Thai, is playing on Monday at 1pm at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. I two pairs of tickets for that one, but they've been given away.

The New York Asian Film Festival runs from June 25 to July 8 at the Walter Reade Theater, July 1 to 4 at the Japan Society and midnights on June 25-26 and July 2-3 at the IFC Center.