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Complicating things are a venal but essentially loyal sidekick (Shahkrit Yamnarm), whom the assassin takes under his wing for training, and a sweet young deaf-mute pharmacist (Charlie Yeung) who makes the assassin — who calls himself Joe — weak in the knees. Also, Joe is finding it increasingly difficult to pull the plug on his emotions and his victims. To paraphrase a line from Grosse Pointe Blank, either he’s fallen in love or he’s developed a newfound respect for life.

The movie, remade by the Hong Kong twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang from their own 1999 thriller, is on some level banal and plotless. But the Pangs, along with cinematographer Decha Srimantra, give us a gloomy mood piece about being utterly alone in a city of nine million. The Bangkok of this movie, as filtered through Joe’s eyes, is full of crime and people on the make, a densely packed steampot of sin. The only oasis is a glowing white pharmacy and the conveniently nonverbal angel within. (In the original film, it was the assassin who was deaf-mute.) Why Nicolas Cage doesn’t do more romantic movies is a puzzlement; he’s got the soul for it. Joe is a beast until he meets the beauty, whereupon he opens up.

I won’t soon forget Cage’s delicate work in the scene wherein Joe the amoral monster takes his sweetie out to dinner, attempting to grab a semblance of normality while it lasts. The conversation is limited to how hot the food is, countered by the pharmacist’s offer of leaves to balm Joe’s tongue, but Cage’s yearning eyes do the talking for both of them. Later in the date, Joe gets to feed a banana to a baby elephant, and rather than giving us an insert of the cute animal, the Pangs keep their camera on Joe, who seems to become five years old for a few seconds. The plot device is all too threadbare — this innocent young woman is supposed to re-introduce Joe to his humanity. Been there, seen that. But it’s not the notes, it’s how Cage plays them.

Other than a gory moment involving a boat propeller, the violence is subdued, even classy. It’s not meant to look cool, though — people won’t be watching the intricate stunts and gun-fu over and over on the DVD, since there aren’t any. Joe kills for a living; it is what it is. “Bad man?” asks Joe’s sidekick about the latest target. “Bad for someone,” Joe shrugs. As in Grosse Pointe Blank, we mostly don’t know what the doomed men have done to earn a price on their heads, at least not until the last job, the one that gives the assassin pause. Bangkok Dangerous isn’t anything great or original; it’s a riff, and it’s dependent almost entirely on Nicolas Cage and the way he has of making Joe look pained even when he’s smiling (in a few shots he looks eerily like Andy Kaufman). Cage has been making choices in recent years (hello, The Wicker Man) that don’t always make sense to the rest of us. I always get the feeling, though, that whatever film he does satisfies some need or curiosity he has at the time; it’s not just for the paycheck. And this one finishes on a surprisingly downbeat, non-Hollywood note.

I’m a Cage fan: your mileage may vary. But whatever its narrative predictability, "Bangkok Dangerous" proves there’s still reason to stay interested in Cage, and in whatever he gets interested in next.

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originally posted: 09/08/08 08:50:58
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