More Nic Cage: Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

This one has been on my radar for a while. Bangkok Dangerous is described as a movie about a hitman on his last job in Bangkok who zooms around in high speed motorcycle chases and always gets his mark. Machine guns, hot women, foreign lands, what more could you want? Oh yeah, Nic Cage! We have a recipe for a perfect movie right here folks! Well, not for most, but I generally like Mr. Cage so it sounded good to me. Hit the jump and I'll tell you what I thought of it!


I was looking forward to this movie quite a lot. I never like to get myself hyped up about anything, it rarely ends well for anyone. So I'll cut to the chase, this was a TERRIBLE movie. This had to be one of the most boring action movies I've ever seen. The special effects made it look like it was from the 90's with no budget, and the "high speed chases" were almost slow and mundane. He is on a motorcycle a lot, but most of the time he's just going about town either stalking his next target and taking notes, or going shopping at the local pharmacy cause he got a scrape.

The one interesting thing the movie had going for it was that our main character, only known as Joe, falls for a deaf local girl at that pharmacy I mentioned before. He's a stone cold killer, yet he's awkward and clumsy around her. It was really cute and almost all the scenes with her had very little dialog, I assume because there's just not much point of Joe pretty much talking to himself. Remember, not only is she deaf, but her lip reading isn't for English either, so the double whammy on the communication front made for some cute pantomiming.

Fon tries to show Joe how to feed a baby elephant, awwww

That would be all well and good, if for some reason the movie didn't also fill almost every other scene with a shocking lack of dialog. It was like they were too scared to have the locals talk for fear of having to make the audience *GASP* read subtitles! So while the scenes with his girlfriend were cute, their uniqueness of being so quiet was stolen by a movie filled with people who can talk perfectly fine, rarely ever talking.

Then there's the fact that this is supposed to be an action movie. Sure there's action, but it's all terrible except for a small number of scenes towards the end. The pacing is just awful in this movie, and it's very slow and feels uneventful even though he is hunting and taking dudes out. But even then when the stakes are predictably raised and he has to save the day in the final act, what little good action there is, is also littered with just boring bad scenes that clearly looked much better on paper. I particularly hated one scene where a shootout briefly takes place in a room bathed in red light. So much red light that it almost makes it hard to tell what's going on.

Oh, I see. We're going to slowly walk down these aisles shooting blindly through the water bottles. That's exciting, right?

In the end, I was really let down by this. It had all the ingredients for a great action movie. Lots of killing, awesome Bangkok backdrops and clubs, exciting chases on motorcycles, cool scenes of cultural moments on his dates with is sweet and innocent girlfriend. It could have been all of that, but instead it was pretty much none of that. Well, I guess the bits with the girlfriend where that, but still could have been done better. Avoid this one, it's an utter waste of time.