“You lost your elephant again? You’re sure it’s an elephant and not a kitten? How do you keep losing him?”

That’s all there is to say about The Protector 2, honestly. When a film’s plot revolves around the kidnapping of an elephant, what possible new direction can a sequel take? The movie at least shows restraint in not upping the stakes by having a whole herd of elephants get kidnapped somehow. Although it does raise the stakes by somehow tying the abduction of an elephant to an attempt to assassinate two presidents and destabilize an entire country. The movie is about this, and also features massive motorcycle chases, a fight in a pit filling with flowing flaming oil, and a fight on a train track in which the participants’ limbs act as lightsabers when they connect because their bodies are charged by the third rail (yep). And yet, it’s boring.

It’s boring because it’s filled with CGI, and CGI is the enemy of a good martial arts action film. When every money shot features obviously fake elements, it’s impossible to cheer for them. There are so many cool fights in this movie that build excitement only to dash away the payoff with the sudden intrusion of a cartoon. Tony Jaa is still an impressive fighter, and he’s again surrounded himself with other equally impressive martial artists to duel, but the effort is squandered.

Jaa reprises his role of Kham, who lives a peaceful existence in rural Thailand with his beloved elephant friend Khon. But then Khon is kidnapped by gangsters working for American kingpin LC (RZA), who I think is an arms dealer, but I wasn’t really sure what was up. In any case, he has a coterie of martial artists working under him who are ranked in skill by numbers branded onto their skin, but we only see, like, two of them, so it’s a bit of a waste. Kham goes to Bangkok to find Khon, and runs into his old friend Sergeant Mark, who is working with Interpol to protect the peace talks of the wartorn nation Katana from terrorists. Naturally, their two missions turn out to be related.

While it may be overlong and overly computer-generated, The Protector 2 is at least kept watchable by its practical fighting and by its sense of humor. Jaa is no Jackie Chan, but the slapstick is appreciably goofy, and a nice counterbalance to the needlessly overcomplicated (and eventually, pretty much forgotten) plot. There’s one great moment where he appears to have defeated a motorcycle gang, only for a veritable horde of their comrades to rev up and surround him. And that’s not even getting into all the amazing facial expressions RZA makes. It’s always strangely engrossing to see an American playing the role of the evil foreigner.

Director Prachya Pinkaew still knows how to shoot a good action scene, right up until the point where an impossible shot has to take place and the screen is inundated in bad pixelry. A perfect example is the aforementioned motorcycle fight, which escalates in an amusing way even as its momentum gets stolen out from under it with video game-like shots of men slamming into trains or jumping off bridges. What hurts the most is that it feels like 80% of these beats could have been accomplished practically. That laziness hobbles The Protector 2.

Grade: C-