Review of Bangkok Dangerous (2008) by Graham B — 28 Jun 2011

Hitman "Joe" (Nicholas Cage) travels to Bangkok to complete his last 4 assignments at the behest of a local Gangster, Surat (Nirattisai Kaljaruek). Of course Joe takes a young protege Kong (Shakrit Yamnarm) and falls for local girl Fon (Charlie Young) who's deaf. And of course this all leads the ruthless and efficient Joe to disregard his own rules and grow a conscience rather late in the game, and of course this leads him to confront Surat.

Yeah, this thing hits every story beat and cliche for the Hit Man action movie. Nicholas Cage is effective if subdued, playing it straight and not going off the rails (which makes one wonder why you'd cast Cage if your not planning on letting him go shall we say eccentric). As the villians of the piece Surat and his right hand man Aran (Dom Hetrakul) look the part but end up being non-entities, they stand around talking about taking care of bussiness then at the end die in a hail of bullets. The leading ladies Fon and a dancer named Aom (Panward Hemmanee) are gorgious but don't do much. Though seriously there gorgious, you ever see a guy walking down the street with a woman and say to yourself "Fuck that guy, he doesn't deserve her" well I saw these ladies and was like "Fuck Thailand, don't deserve that". Seriously Arnold Schwarzengger as Conan the Barbarian appeared to me in my minds eye and was like "Go over there Canada, kick the shit out of Thailand and drag these ladies back to your Long Ships" why he thought we had Long Ships I do not know. But seriously when it comes down to it what we have here is an average and uninspired action movie. Catch it on TV don't pay money for it.