Bangkok Dangerous is a remake of the highly praised 1999 Thai film of the same name. The weird part about that is the directors of the older movie also did this updated American version. Oxide Pang and Danny Pang, collectively known as The Pang Brothers, have brought their hitman action flick to U.S. audiences. This time around Nicolas Cage takes the reigns as a man simply known as Joe. He’s a hitman sent to Bangkok for a series of jobs for a crime boss. While there he takes on a student who was acting as his errand boy. He also meets a deaf-mute woman at a pharmacy and starts a relationship with her. All the while he’s still killing his targets. Well Mr. and Mr. Pang, you should have kept this one a Thai film. The movie falls flat on so many levels. It’s all pretty bad.
Nicolas Cage CAN be a good actor. I know this for a fact. He’s pretty damn awesome in Raising Arizona, Adaptation, Matchstick Men, and some other things. But then it’s almost as if he tries to be a walking joke in things like Ghost Rider, The Wicker Man, and one of my personal favorites Con-Air. This one isn’t even ‘so bad it’s good’ like some would say those joke ones I listed are. It’s just so bad it’s bad. Cage is his normal monotone self so not much can be said there. A background isn’t explained much to tell the audience how he got involved with a crime boss even though he seems like a decent stand up guy. He just does the killings with no questions asked. His love story is out of place. He’s killing people with no emotion but then falling for a girl and going on silly dates. Why was this needed? To try to bring chicks to the movie theater? I guess it was an attempt to show he has emotions. In the Thai version, the hitman is a deaf-mute but of course we can’t give Nicolas Cage a role with no spoken words so it was Americanized.
And then there’s this young student of his. For some reason he sees a dude in a marketplace trying to swindle some Americans and he thinks he would be a good apprentice. He brings him on the job to run his errands so he doesn’t get seen out and about on town. Then he just starts trusting the guy and training him as an assassin. There was no need for an errand boy or an apprentice because Cage is going out on dates and being seen by everyone anyway. It’s not like he was trying to be secluded until his next job. It barely made sense and the only good scenes where when jobs starting going wrong and Cage had to go on the run. There was some decent action mixed in with an otherwise terrible plot. I almost wish this was bad like The Wicker Man so I could laugh at it (plus I was pretty entertained by his last crapper, Next) but instead I was bored. And the ending tried to be shocking but it just made things worse. A man who starts feeling like his isolated life is worthless starts doing something about it to change and this is how the movie progresses. Then there’s the end which contradicts the whole progession of the character.
IMDB – 5.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes – 10%
Movie Wiseguys – 4/10
