Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/6/08
Ah, the tragic lot of those
among us who have the misfortune to have been born Killing Machines.
It is one of the most miraculous aspects of the role movies play in our
lives that we become so attached to people who have never lived and have
no basis in the real world that we're eager to see stories that deconstruct
those fantasies, mulling the lot of the Inhuman Condition of being a movie
character. For decades we watched indestructible supermen mow down
everyone who stood between them and justice. From time to time, it
was an anti-hero whose job was to rain death on the innocent, seeing the
error of his ways. But there came a time when filmmakers started
to think "You know, it's really not such a good thing to spend your whole
day killing people, even if they are bad," and those guys started feeling
really bad about it. Such a character is at the center of The Pang
Brothers' Bangkok Dangerous, a remake of their own 1999 Korean thriller
that sounds (I've never seen it) like it was substantially more grounded
in the real world of Far East crime. The new movie is a big time
Star Vehicle for Nicolas Cage, who turns in another of his patented essays
on soulful despair as a hit man who is a master of murder but so divorced
from the people around him that a few kind words and a meeting of eyes
across a pharmacy turn his entire world upside-down. The movie's
a bit slow and breaks no new ground, but damn if I didn't think “Man, it
must be so sad to be a Killing Machine.”
Joe (Cage) is a globe-trotting
assassin, and a damn good one. He was trained to follow four simple
rules which involve total secrecy and killing anyone who even gets close.
But the fourth rule says that the moment you think it's time to get out
of the business, it's time to get out of the business, and he's planned
a trip to Thailand during which he's booked four hits: the fabled
“last job”. He starts the job the same way he always does, renting
a secluded house to be his home base and recruiting a petty criminal to
be his leg man, knowing full well that his final bit of cleanup will be
this hired hand's murder. He selects Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm), who
proves to be quite bad at the job. When he delivers a case with the
photo and gun for Victim #2 already opened thanks to criminals who tried
to steal it, it's Joe's inclination to kill Kong then and there.
Instead, he's surprised to find himself responding to the kid's desire
to learn his lethal skills, and takes him under his wing as his student.
Meanwhile, a random trip to the pharmacy leads to Joe locking eyes with
Fon (Charlie Yeung), a deaf-mute girl with whom he's instantly smitten.
But there were reasons for that assassin's code, and as he sees himself
more and more as a person through the admiring eyes of his new friends,
Joe begins to question his final target, a crusading politician.
Rule #5: when you fail to complete the job, you become the target,
and that goes double for anyone close to you.
Bangkok Dangerous
is the prototype fall action movie: a quality actor gives a good,
serious performance fronting a deadly serious thriller that breaks no new
ground but does its' job well enough that you don't feel ripped off.
The movie does have a couple of novel touches, particularly in the Thai
setting, where elephants just walk around the streets like stray cats.
The Bangkok location is quite appropriate for Joe's awakening, because
I suspect he'd be awkward around anyone, but the language barrier (even
extending to sign language where Fon is concerned) helps to highlight how
out of place he is doing anything but pulling a trigger. His relationship
with Kong is also quite interesting in the way the student never really
seems to grasp what his teacher does for a living, and the unjustified
hero worship ends up making the kid a better person. I'll grant you
that the movie seems to have no sense of the passage of time, and either
Kong seems to pick up not only everything Joe knows but all his physical
prowess in a couple hours or Joe built in a month's vacation to his assassination
schedule.
As I mentioned, I've never
seen the original Bangkok, but perusing the synopsis on IMDB makes
me marvel at what a crazy little mash-up of its' plot the new movie is.
I'll leave it to “Scott from Milwaukee” to explain: “The story is
of a deaf-mute hitman and his partner who are based in Bangkok. He is friends
with his partner's girlfriend who is a stripper at a local club. They go
about their assassination business as usual as the boss climbs the underworld
ladder and forms new alliances. Flashbacks explain how he got to this point
in his life. He forms a relationship with a young woman from the pharmacy
who is caring and innocent. The hunts continue as treachery begins. A big
name hit makes him realize that good people are hurt by his actions. The
first rule of assassination closes in on him as he strikes revenge.”
Thanks, Scott. I'd imagine not too many movies about a deaf-mute
hitman with a fully vocal girlfriend have been remade as movies about a
fully vocal hitman with a deaf-mute girlfriend. And used his name
as the name of a different character. The new Bangkok does
still have the stripper (sexy Panward Hemmanee).
Because things move at a
less than blistering pace, it's up to the actors to keep our attention,
and they do their job well. Cage wears his sad and awkward face effectively,
skillfully delivering a lot of narrative exposition about the art of assassination.
Most important in this sort of movie, when it's time to go Full Killing
Machine in the final reel, he's quite convincing. Yamnarm does a
great job peeling back Kong's layers from the fast-talking jerk we first
meet. Yeung pulls off a role that could have been absurd: her
big-hearted pharmacist feels real, rather than the silent movie cliché
you might expect, and her reaction when she sees Joe in action feels as
honest as it is understandable. Nirattisai Kaljaruek and Dom Hetrakul
do great jobs as, respectively, the man who hired Joe and his henchman.
It's interesting that they seem a bit out of their depth commissioning
a real assassination, and they panic much earlier in the process than seems
to be justified, a little dose of the unexpected in an otherwise preordained
narrative.
The Peng Brothers' second
stab at this story is directed efficiently, with perhaps a little less
narrative momentum than it could have used. But they do indulge themselves
a few moments of memorable ghoulishness, particularly when one of Joe's
targets loses his gun hand only to have the assassin reach down, pick the
gun out of the still-twitching hand, and use it. Give him credit,
he could have picked up the whole hand and made the man a de facto suicide.
Ask me a year from today
and I don't expect to have a particularly good memory of Bangkok Dangerous,
but I enjoyed it while watching and I expect most Nic Cage fans to do the
same. It's a cool, efficient thriller than sets a unexotic story
in an exotic part of the world and manages to make us feel a ton of empathy
for a man who is, quite simply, a monster. But I don't blame him:
it's hard to have Killing Machinehood thrust upon you. |
