“Bangkok Dangerous”

Movies are a brotherhood. Wherever you look, there are siblings fighting for space behind the camera. The heyday of the Taviani brothers may, I fear, be over, but we still have the Coens, who are on a roll. In the agonized corner, we have the Dardenne boys of Belgium, and, facing them, those naughty Wachowski kids from Matrixland. Soon, you won’t be able to approach a studio without a blood relation in tow; look out for the long-lost Peregrine Eastwood and a delicate new project from Ang and Chuck Lee. In the meantime, here come the Pangs. Danny Pang and the rousingly named Oxide Pang are twins from Hong Kong, best known for their 1999 hit “Bangkok Dangerous.” This they have now remade for the English-speaking market, titling it, after a lengthy period of reflection, “Bangkok Dangerous.” The city is described in voice-over as “corrupt, dirty, and dense,” in contrast to the characters, who are uniformly fair-minded, well scrubbed, and partial to quantum mechanics.

Nicolas Cage plays Joe London, which I strongly suspect of being an alias. He has a sheaf of passports at his disposal, together with explosive devices, a high-powered rifle, and other appurtenances of the discerning man-about-town. Joe is an assassin by trade, but then, these days, who isn’t? Assassins are to the movies what plumbers are to ordinary life: they’re trained, they’re overpriced, they never call back, but sometimes they’re just what you need. “Holiday,” Joe says, when asked by Thai customs what he is doing in Bangkok, and his vacation plans include the murder of four men. To match that, he has four instructions for any aspiring killer: don’t ask questions, don’t take an interest in people outside the job, erase every trace of your presence, and get out when you can.

I can think of American Presidents who have followed these rules to the letter, whereas Joe proceeds to break them all. The last twenty minutes of the film, for instance, are taken up with an entirely superfluous diversion to a factory yard, where he takes the opportunity, rather than leaving the country, to waste as many of its citizens as he reasonably can. Earlier, he makes nice to the assistant in a local pharmacy and, in an unprecedented breach of homicidal protocol, invites her out to dinner. This is intended to demonstrate his softer side, just when we were getting used to the idea that he doesn’t have one, yet his choice of date is a giveaway: she can’t speak. Much the same goes for Aom (Panward Hemmanee), the dancer who acts as a link to Joe’s employer, and who communicates mostly through her hips. In short, we are back in the territory of “The Departed.” Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winner, adapted from a Hong Kong original, was far superior to “Bangkok Dangerous,” but it, too, tamped down the presence of women, as if they were a threat to its manly postures. In both cases, we are left with the unpalatable sense of females being welcome to join in, so long as they don’t open their mouths.


There was a time when Nicolas Cage, with his hangdog barks of irony, could have shouldered some of the women’s work, mocking his own penchant for excess. Now, however, the more ridiculous his films become, the more seriously he takes them—and the more, presumably, he is paid to do so. The Cage of “Wild at Heart” and “Leaving Las Vegas” found life to be engrossingly weird, and treated it accordingly, whereas the Cage of “Bangkok Dangerous” intones a line like “There’s a beer in the refrigerator” as if he were reading from the Book of Micah. He appears sunken throughout, understandably depressed by his long, ropy mane of black hair; from a certain angle he’s a ringer for Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders. Only once does the Cage of yore flicker into view. It happens when Joe enlists the services of a resourceful thief, who introduces himself as Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm). “Kong?” Joe repeats, with a smile and a drawl, as though wondering when the guy is going to stop fingering wallets and start climbing the nearest tower.

It would be heartening to report that the Pangs inject new blood into the action movie, a noble genre now verging on the anemic. But Hollywood and the television industry have long since sucked what they require from the tropes and rhythms of Asian films, and parts of “Bangkok Dangerous,” far from seeming unfamiliar or freshly stylized, offer nothing that you couldn’t catch in an episode of “CSI.” Traffic lights aside, the color scheme ranges all the way from dirty white to steely gray-blue, reinforcing the solemnity of the tale. Gunplay is intercut with closeups of bangled feet and floating lotus blooms, subtly indicating that it takes all sorts. And so the movie grinds on, diligently skirting every chance to surprise. As the brothers Pang export their brand of busy gloom around the world, following “Bangkok Dangerous” with “Moscow Expensive” and “Geneva Pleasantly Safe,” is this what we can expect from the globalization of cinema? Will movies, wherever they hail from, end up looking the same?

The original title of “Mister Foe,” when it opened in Europe, was “Hallam Foe,” and that was a better fit. It’s the name of the central character, played by Jamie Bell, and one thing he never feels like is a Mister. First, he doesn’t turn eighteen until halfway through the movie; and, second, he hardly slots into society with the assurance—either the ease of body or the confidence of spirit—that would lead anyone to call him Mr. Foe. On the one occasion when a friend at work does use that term of address, it is said with a sour snarl, as if to caution Hallam not to grow up too fast.