Bangkok Dangerous

Nicolas Cage has spent the majority of his career travelling back and forth between challenging dramatic roles and goofy action roles, continually reminding moviegoers that he has genuine acting talent while also continually hamming it up in front of the camera. It is hard not to think of his exciting work in Leaving Las Vegas, Bringing Out the Dead, and Matchstick Men without being reminded of his ridiculous performances in Con Air, Windtalkers, and Next. Cage has made a considerable amount of bad movies in his career, but his latest starring effort, the assassin action picture Bangkok Dangerous, is so ludicrously awful that it makes his previous trash look like delectable meals.

Shot on location in Bangkok, featuring a Thai cast and crew, and directed by Thai brothers Danny and Oxide Pang (remaking their own 1999 movie, for some inexplicable reason), Bangkok Dangerous is so stunningly stupid that I almost felt sorry for the movie. Almost. Even an overwhelmingly generous mood cannot shine an altogether sympathetic light on such dreck.

Cage looks comfortably idiotic in the role of Joe, an assassin-for-hire that has managed to survive all this time due to his strict following of four golden rules. The rules cover such territory as never getting involved with other people and never asking questions. So, it only makes sense that Joe breaks all of his rules over the course of the movie. Without such uncharacteristic stupidity, there is no conflict and so Joe gets to play the part of a moron for 90 minutes because the story requires him to do so.

Attempting to summarize the plot of Bangkok Dangerous is a challenge because there are so many sub-plots crammed into the movie, all of which are battling for control of the story. There's the fact that Joe is in Bangkok to commit four separate assassinations. There is a love story between Joe and a deaf pharmacist who believes that Joe is a banker. There's even a mentor portion of the story, in which Joe takes a local under his wing and teaches him the secrets of being an assassin. None of these sub-plots are satisfying in any way, but they could have at least benefited from a mildly focused approach. Instead, each one tries to pull the movie in its own direction, attempting to sabotage the other sub-plots. The result is an ugly, confused labyrinth of nonsense.

The action sequences are equal to the story in terms of redundancy. Nothing in any of the sequences possesses even a shred of originality, as the Pang brothers employ such stale visual tricks as the camera following a CGI bullet travel from gun barrel to target's head. In fact, the only thing that is at all unique about these sequences is how visually incoherent they are. Villains are disposed of in such roughly shot and edited fashion that the method of their disposal remains a mystery. It is clear that Joe is running around and shooting people, but connecting the geographical dots in these sequences is a futile effort at best.

The movie's big finale, in which Joe takes on a small army of villains in an attempt to signal his sudden grasp of morality, features some of the worst action choreography and direction that I have seen in quite some time. Obviously inspired by John Woo's balletic gunplay in such movies as The Killer and Hard Boiled (both of which are superior to this movie in every way), the Pang brothers toss Joe into increasingly laughable situations, such as a gun battle between Joe and a generic bad guy that involves the pair shooting at each other from either side of a long row of water cooler jugs. They both keep stride with each other the whole way, blasting holes in the jugs and missing each other every time. Finally, the bad guy drops dead at the end of the row, a sure sign that one of the bullets has hit him. Or maybe he just suffered a heart attack. There really is no way to tell, because the sequence is so poorly executed that nothing ever connects. Bad guys are consistently dropping dead because it is their time to go, but the movie's visual language fails to make any sense of the killings.

Joe is such an expert that his bullets take out bad guys at nearly every pull of the trigger, unless he is required to miss in order to facilitate a silly slow-motion sequence aimed at creating some visual energy. This approach to the action sequences stifles their ability to excite and entertain, because Joe never seems to be in very much trouble. The villains (both the main ones and the throw-away generic ones) are never convincing and so the conflict between hero and villain is never interesting to watch. Mercilessly, nothing else about the story is interesting to watch either. The love story is a waste of time (though without it, the movie would be only about 70 minutes long, so that explains its inclusion) and the mentor-apprentice storyline is an awkward distraction that goes nowhere.

Seeing Nicolas Cage carelessly wade through such grimy waters may be a disappointment given his apparent (though perhaps dissipating) acting talent, but it certainly comes as no surprise. He has made it very clear time and again that he is perfectly content collecting a paycheque for starring in trashy action flicks that will only be remembered for their aimless stupidity. Bangkok Dangerous is arguably the worst of the bunch, but it probably won't be the last. Cage is at home in the world of disposable junk and there are no signs that he is about to abandon that world in favour of entering more challenging territory. Perhaps the days of Cage taking chances with his career are behind him. Now we have to settle for an aging action star who is far easier to laugh at than to cheer for.