Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #14: Bangkok Dangerous

2008 action thriller

Rating: 8/20

Plot: Joe's a hitman with a set of rules that have made him very successful at his job. Successful and alive. While doing a series of jobs in the titular capital city, he breaks one of those rules twice, forming personal relationships with a cute little deaf girl and mentoring a young punk who he picked up to run errands for him. Should have stuck to the rules, Joe, because now you've got a mess on your hands. I think that's a Jimi Hendrix lyric, isn't it? Hey, Joe, you were messing around with a pharmacist and a pickpocket and now you've got a big old mess on your hands. Something like that.

First off--nice hair, Nicolas Cage. Second off--really terrible movie, Nicolas Cage. This is really boring stuff, and Cage sleepwalking his way through Bangkok definitely doesn't help. A better title for this would have been Bangkok Wearisome. Cage's character once again performs narrator duties, unnecessarily since in this one, the narration adds no color, no depth, no wit, no nothing to the storyline as it does in, say, a Raising Arizona or Lord of War. Speaking of that storyline, there barely enough here to be able to give anybody writing credit. It's derivative and predictable and, in case I didn't make it clear before, extremely bland, the movie equivalent of a white guy singing the blues. This is a movie that takes itself so seriously, really sapping the life and fun out of the son of a bitch. So seriously, in fact, that it strangely becomes almost impossible for the viewer to take it seriously. It all builds up to a preposterous bullet-fueled ending that ends up as more of a pretentious whimper than the kaboom it wants to be. Cage's character has this really cool ability to vanish and rematerialize a foot and a half from the person trying to kill him which is kind of neat though. There's a really great scene where Cage and another guy with a gun run on either side of stacks of water bottles in a warehouse bathed in red light and just shoot the hell out of those water bottles. This has to break the record for the highest water bottle body count in cinema history. It's all really stupid. Maybe they should have called this movie Bangkok Ridiculous instead. Or Bangkok Predictable. Or just Bangkok Silly. Whatever name you put on it, it's a terrible movie.