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I wonder how they feel about ripping off the audience. Bangkok Dangerous, version America, is a ripoff no matter how you care to define that word. Confusing "cool" with "comatose," the film offers no return on any level of investment, emotional or otherwise. Ten dollars is the going rate for your average movie ticket, which is roughly a hundred times what any reasonable person should expect to pay to view this whack-happy waxworks.
The chief exhibit is Nicolas Cage, drifting ever further away from the vitality of the work he did before winning an Oscar gave him a license to mope and blow things up. He plays Joe, a robotic hitman who shows up in the title city to do his One Last Job. Upon arrival, Joe hires local hustler Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm) to be his errand boy and go-between, fully planning to knock him off via heroin overdose once the four-part Last Job is finished; Kong's loyalty and scrappy nature, however, end up breaking down Joe's carefully-maintained hardass facade, and the weary assassin starts to take a shine to his helper. He also becomes enamored of Fon, (Charlie Yeung), a deaf-mute pharmacist's assistant. No points for guessing that this will all turn out badly.
Yet, while the Pang Brothers direct this as though cliches were the universal language (when Cage decides not to kill Yamnarm, he intones, "When I looked into his eyes... I saw myself"), the derivative nature of the material isn't the root problem. A lack of narrative surprises certainly didn't hurt Iron Man or The Strangers, to use two examples from earlier this summer. The death knell for Bangkok Dangerous is in its lethargy. The tone is set by Cage in what may be his single worst performance. I can only assume that Cage was aiming for taciturn cool with an undercurrent of danger in the vein of Alain Delon in Le Samourai or Leon Lai in Fallen Angels. The problem is that even though Cage's strengths are myriad, they're almost all best suited for overplaying - subtlety isn't in his blood. He's generally boring when he tries to tamp down his natural grandiosity (think City of Angels or Bringing Out the Dead); as such, his attempt at laconism comes off as mere stolid dreariness. He seems hardly ready to rouse himself out of bed, let alone carry out several complicated hit jobs.
But even if Cage carried the expressiveness of Lon Chaney, it wouldn't help because we'd need to be able to see his face. At some point during production, the Pang Brothers decided the best way to depict the growing moral murk in which Joe finds himself would be to make the movie as murky as possible. Huge black shadows cast across every surface, with the primary light source in several scenes being a single sickly fluorescent light. When color does show up, it's generally a dark blue, drab brown or electric green. Maybe this makes sense as an artistic choice, depicting Bangkok as a dark neon hellground, but it also makes several scenes (the final warehouse gun battle among them) virtually unwatchable.
Thus, it's because of its own narcosis that the utter familiarity that trickles off Bangkok Dangerous is grating, not through any fault of the material itself. A stronger director and livelier star might have been able to turn this into something breezy and sleazy instead of a depressingly impassive and self-serious monolith of massacre. There is fun to be had, but you have to make it rather than get it - I derived some base amusement from how apathetic the Pang Brothers are about hiding the places from where they steal. Fallen Angels is an obvious source, with its hitman of few words and mute side character, so it's doubly amusing to note that Charlie Yeung had a crucial role in the Kar-wai film. There's a following-the-bullet scene that put me in mind of Lord of War, another (better) Nicolas Cage film. Even Cage's hair is stolen from the sci-fi stiff Next. (Like John Travolta before him, Cage has reached a point where the sole interest about his roles involves how awful his hairdo is going to be.)
It seems strangely appropriate to note that Cage first encounters Yamnarm on the street hard-selling fake Rolex watches to American tourists, as it would be harder to find a more thorough demonstration of ersatz cinema than what the Pangs are trying to foist on the American public with Bangkok Dangerous. I can think of no good reason to recommend ever wasting a couple hours on this nonsense when there's so many other viewing options from which to choose. Unless you derive enjoyment from watching marginally talented hacks chew on their own tails.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)