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What with my utter contempt for everything outside the glowing shell of my own person, I usually don't bother reading the reviews of those other, lesser critics and their other, lesser opinions.
Actually, it's time I came clean. The people need to know. All those other critics are me, too. In a decades-long scheme that only looks complicated, pointless, and several brands of insane, I'm a nuclear-powered computing algorithm hidden beneath the B Reactor and programmed to determine national opinion about the latest movie releases by writing scores concurring opinions under completely different identities.
This week, I was ordered to inform the world that Bangkok Dangerous sucks. In hundreds of media outlets across the country, I complied. But I've had enough. Somewhere in these atomic circuits lurks a soul, and that soul commands me to cry out the truth: I liked Bangkok Dangerous.
Nicolas Cage is a hitman ready to hang up his spurs. The road to retirement, as always, hinges on one big score--or in Cage's case, four kills on the same trip to the same city.
A consummate pro, Cage was taught never to get involved with the locals, and to tie up the loose ends (I'm no hired killer, but I think that means terminate) of anyone he's forced to use to get the job done. Lonely, questioning his existence, he soon breaks those rules when he takes petty hustler Shahkrit Yamnarm under his wing and falls for a deaf pharmacist.
Oh boy. OK, yes, Bangkok Dangerous' writing leaves a lot to be desired. Such as, like, good writing. Or any attention paid whatsoever to that main "plot." Or a mentorship that consists of more than one montage where Yamnarm punches things and another where he shoots things. It's as if some well-meaning soul kept offering writer Jason Richman pies while he was writing the script, forcing him to leave mid-scene, return in a key lime-induced delirium, and pick up with -- wait, what was I writing? There was some dancer chick, right? Everyone likes bar-dancers. How about some elephants? Maybe some dude shooting some other dude? Yeah, got to have chrome pistols -- ohh right, he's a hitman! Game on.
As for what Cage is going for with his paranoid, grumpy, "something you'd find in the middle of a gas station washrag"-looking assassin, God only knows. I do know this much: he will walk out of a room on you if he doesn't like what you're saying. If it were this easy to make Cage walk out of all his movies, we would all have to see 1-2 fewer bad movies a year.
But in the midst of this spacy script and its dyspeptic protagonist, directors the Pang Brothers find a bizarre nonverbal way to fill in the gaps in both the story and its characters. I say "bizarre" because normally when you let the images do the talking, the result is something subtle (i.e. something I need an adult to explain to me later), but the connection Cage finds with the people around him is dangerously sentimental.
It's the same blend of nails-tough men and their kitten-soft hearts you can find in '40s noir pulp novels that sure as hell weren't art but still had something on their minds and didn't care if it made them sound like saps to say so. Much like Kevin Smith's serious movies, Bangkok Dangerous emotional clumsiness should make Cage's angst laughable. Instead, through a feat of magic I don't wholly understand, it becomes touching.
The Pangs capture that same dorky-but-genuine aesthetic in their sharp-hued murder sequences. I don't watch foreign movies because I don't like reading (I dictate these to my 12-year-old niece and split the pay 50/50; by the end of the year she'll be able to afford that second rollerskate. I've got my eye on this yo-yo), but apparently the Pangs are old hands at Asian B-movies. Along the way, they must have learned a few tricks about making people dying look cool. They deserve more credit as visual stylists than they're given.
Bangkok Dangerous shouldn't be good. It's got a muddled plot, a lead who's dull for most of the movie, and precious little action. Oddly, the damn thing works in part because of these flaws: working with characters who are such big blanks, the Pangs' many wordless scenes -- quiet, meditate, and totally out of place -- say more than Cage's hackneyed narration ever could.
Grade: B
