Rama’s SCREEN

As a thriller movie I say BANGKOK DANGEROUS has only a few scenes, and I repeat.. a few scenes that are worth watching but for the most part… I don’t think I wanna put the word “cool” anywhere near this one. You don’t have to watch the original version to understand the remake because I’ve seen both and they’re practically the same with slight differences here and there. BANGKOK DANGEROUS is not as dangerous and hot as the city it portrays. This is the kind that I’d be impressed with if I were watching it in the 1980s or early 90s.

The life of an anonymous assassin takes an unexpected turn when he travels to Thailand to complete a series of contract killings. Joe (Nicolas Cage), a remorseless hitman, is in Bangkok to execute four enemies of a ruthless crime boss named Surat. He hires Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm), a street punk and pickpocket, to run errands for him with the intention of covering his tracks by killing him at the end of the assignment. Strangely, Joe, the ultimate lone wolf, instead finds himself mentoring the young man while simultaneously being drawn into a tentative romance with a local shop girl. As he falls further under the sway of Bangkok’s intoxicating beauty, Joe begins to question his isolated existence and let down his guard… just as Surat decides it’s time to clean house.

The thing I’m most disappointed with are the action sequences. Some of them strike me as making it too easy for Nic’s character to simply kill and get away like a ghost.
It’s as if the villains he’s targeting don’t have much protection or bodyguards to begin with. It lacks challenge.
When I see a chase scene, sometimes it’s cool to see the good guys are left way behind, cause then you’re intrigued to find out how he’s going to catch up to the ones he’s pursuing.
In this, it’s as if there’s no distance whatsoever between the captor and his prey.
The gunfight in the last scene is rather weak. I’m not sure why filmmakers The Pang Brothers thought that having it done inside a storage room full of jugs would be a good idea because in my humble opinion,.. once again,…the scene comes off cheesy and without significant challenge whatsoever.
Yes he can rely on reflection on the mirrors or everywhere to spot where his enemies are. Wooptidoo! Big deal!.. tell us something we don’t know! Show us something we’ve never seen before!

I think screenwriter Jason Richman is able to capture the spirit of the 1999 Thai movie of the same title. But it’s just no solid enough. It feels like he’s just dong this gig half-heartedly.
Scribe William Monahan adapted the Asian movie Infernal Affairs and turned it into The Departed which I thought was ten times better.
I as an Asian think that there are movies from that part of the world that could have the potential to be so much more, they just need the right man to adapt the story.

The Pang brothers who also directed the original version, successfully brings us the close to actual picture of how life looks like in one of the most dense city in the world, Bangkok.
When I say that, I don’t mean it shows it in the same way as The Dark Knight shows Gotham.. because BANGKOK DANGEROUS only goes as far as bringing us the crowd, and the culture, the nightlife, maybe a few supporting character and then it’s mostly about Nic Cage.

Nicolas Cage in this movie is just like Nicolas Cage in his previous movies in recent years. He plays a role that could’ve been played by somebody else and that that somebody would’ve done it as good or even better.
Nothing amazing about his performance in this one, not even his hair, which is like a messier version of Tom Hanks’ hair in The Da Vinci Code.
You’ll wonder what has happened to the Nicolas Cage you remember from Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation.

Overall, BANGKOK DANGEROUS is quite simply of those that you can go without watching and you woudn’t miss much. I think this movie would’ve been something else if an established Hollywood director had helmed the project instead of the Pang Brothers whose vision for this movie is just “so-so”

* Place the cursor on the image below to check my grade for this film