Cold Open

Bangkok Dangerous

by Drew Lazor

ON A STEEL HORSE HE RIDES: Nic Cage is an assassin with a thing for a deaf girl. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Mon., Sept. 8, UA Riverview, 9:25 p.m.

It took one night for Bangkok Dangerous to turn notorious. A $2.7 million return last Friday set up the Pang Brothers' remake of their 1999 Thai action hit for a piddling $7.8 million weekend. It's now the second lowest-grossing No. 1 American film of all time — topped only by 2003's Dickie Roberts: Child Star.

In the original, our hero, Kong, is a deaf gunman who gets his orders through a go-go dancer named Aom and falls in love with a pharmacist who's able to understand him despite his disability.

In this version, Nicolas Cage is Joe, an assassin with menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.com hair, an implied smack problem and a propensity for melodramatic generalizations. ("Bangkok: It's corrupt, it's dirty and it's dense.") Here Kong is the protégé — an eager street urchin who runs packages for Joe through a go-go dancer named Aom. Joe, meanwhile, falls in love with a pharmacist, who's able to understand him despite HER inability to hear. She's also mute.

It's as if the Pangs wrote key plot phrases — CANNOT HEAR! GO-GO! PHARMACIST! — on bits of scrap paper, threw them into a hat and picked them out randomly to restructure this thing for American audiences.

Gaunt line readings and relatively homoerotic training sessions with Kong aside, Cage really isn't the problem here. Nor is the idea that a killing machine can or should have feelings. It's the way in which the directors decided to flesh out Joe — so recklessly that it's simply easier to shield your eyes than laugh.

When it comes to action, the Pangs (The Messengers) are among the most stylish teams working today. But when you follow a scene where a guy gets his hand chopped off by a boat propeller with one set in a restaurant where Joe and his deaf-mute-pharmacist girl giggle about how spicy tom yum soup is (eating fresh basil helps!), it's hard to take either at face value.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)