'Bangkok Dangerous': Cage's remake of assassin film is deadly
The posters for "Bangkok Dangerous" sum up the Nicolas Cage assassin-gets-a-heart picture this way: "It's all in the execution."
That ought to be the epitaph for the lackluster would-be thriller, which opened Friday. It's a remake of a Thai-language original that put brothers Danny and Oxide Pang on the map. But the authentic patina of the original's stylish take on the Bangkok underground's gritty power struggles has been buffed off by the Hollywood polishing wheel.
Movie Review
"Bangkok Dangerous"
One and a half stars
Thriller starring Nicolas Cage, Shaun Delaney and Charlie Young. Directed by Oxide and Danny Pang.
100 minutes.
Rated R for violence, language and some sexuality.
What's left is pretty photography and a rousing chase scene through Bangkok's floating market, sort of James Bond by way of National Geographic Explorer.
Cage, as "Joe," grimaces his way through a turn as a sepulchral hitman who slips across international borders with ease, despite resembling Marilyn Manson minus the weird contacts. He kills in Prague, even disposes of his assistant like a sack of McDonald's wrappers, and glides into Bangkok for the assignments that will allow him to retire. His background remains completely opaque, leaving it to the viewer to fill in his motivation.
Perhaps it's the tropical sunlight on his pallid skin or the reviving effects of Bangkok's notorious Patpong district, where he wanders looking for his next assistant. But somehow, inexplicably, the killer's heart of stone starts to soften.
There are to be four scheduled Bangkok assassinations, part of an apparent consolidation of underground power. He gets scratched during the getaway after killing the first crime lord, and as fate would have it, walks into a pharmacy where Fon (Charlie Yeung) is a clerk.
She's deaf and mute, but the way she pantomimes applying salve melts our grizzled assassin's heart. Without a word, they wander around the city in between his murder assignments, engaged in the sort of Platonic dating rituals that Richie Cunningham would have understood all too well.
She can't talk. Cage can't act. Their pairing produces a bumper crop of tension, but not the good kind. Their connection seems so slight, it's as if they were both shot in blue screen and pasted together.
Yet Fon even has her new American boyfriend over to meet her mother. No fool she, Mom asks the hard questions no one else wants to approach: What does he do for work?
"Banking," Joe stammers. Just when the picture threatens to grow a heart, Joe is mugged as the couple shares a nighttime stroll through a park. Being an ace assassin, Joe reduces the thugs to lunchmeat while Fon, deaf, is unaware of the threat. When she turns around, though, it seems that he is the guy with blood on his hands. He doesn't try to explain, dramatizing the pitfalls of a romantic relationship between two people who cannot talk to each other.
Then, as the last killing job turns out to be an anti-corruption politician revered by average Thai citizens, the film lurches towards its resolution. Can Joe pull the trigger, or has his heart truly been changed by the mute girl who showed him how to feed bananas to an elephant?
If Nic Cage didn't make Keanu Reeves look like Richard Burton, more viewers might stick around to find out.
