One out of Five stars
Running time: 94 mins

Thai action thriller starring Preeti Barameeanant as an ex-con who joins the underground world of Fireball (a deadly combination of basketball and fighting) in order to avenge his twin brother's hospitalisation.

What's it all about?
Directed by Thanakorn Pongsuwan (whose previous hits include Opapatika: The Story of X-Circle), Fireball is a Thai action thriller centring on the titular underground sport, a deadly combination of basketball and martial arts, in which two teams compete to either score a goal or kill each other, whichever happens first. Thai rock star Preeti “Bank” Barameeanant stars as Tai, an ex-con who gets out of jail to discover that his twin brother Tan (also Barameeanant) is in a coma, as a result of entering the world of Fireball in order to raise money for his brother's early release.

Seeking revenge on the man responsible, Tai poses as Tan and joins a team composed of equally desperate fighting types, including Thai boxing champion Zing (9 Million Sam), Thai-African Muk (Kumpanat Oungsoongnern), who's trying to support his pregnant wife, and happy-go-lucky Iq (Kannut Samerjai), who's only fighting to support his dear old mother. Can Tan's slap-happy team score a goal-slash-kill the opposing team and win the match?

The Bad
To be fair, the paper-thin story is only an excuse to set up the fighting, so there's little point getting bogged down in all the various plot-holes (such as the fact that no-one remarks on Tai's remarkable recovery or why anyone halfway decent at fighting would want to join the game in the first place instead of becoming a professional). Pongsuwan is clearly aware of the film's deficiencies in the plot department and duly tries to pad things out with an out-of-nowhere free-running scene, which makes a nice change, but doesn't really help matters.

The Worst
The film's biggest problem is that the fight scenes are appallingly staged and edited, so it's impossible to tell who's hitting who at any given moment. This is made even worse by the fact that the sound effects budget apparently only stretched to one generic punch sound, so you hear the same hitting noise over and over and over again.

Worth seeing?
This is an incoherent and frequently boring mess from beginning to end, thanks to incompetent direction, badly staged fight scenes, a paper-thin plot and poor performances. Avoid.