Bang! Cock! Danger! Us!
Bangkok Dangerous is the Nicolas Cage entry in the
romantic hitman comedy genre like Grosse
Pointe Blank. The movie starts off
with Cage tazering a dude with an accent to death and so you figure he’s just a
Canadian cop or something, but then when he starts talking about how he has a
code of professionalism you know he’s something more, an assassin. But he’s the opposite of the hitman in the
movie Hitman: The Movie. You see in Hitman: The Movie they took Timothy Elephant, an actor with hair,
and shaved his head bald and gave him a number instead of a name and several
scenes where people ask him his name and he balks. Bangkok
Dangerous takes a bald actor, Nicolas Cage, and gives him a toupee and a
perfectly anonymous name but no chance to ever say it. The movie starts off showing us what Prague
Dangerous is, which is not very dangerous, only slightly more dangerous than
Kilkenny Dangerous by my estimations, and then quickly moves to a Bangkok level
of Dangerous which is probably like Def Con 2, but with the tanking American
economy exchange rates are hard to calculate.
Cage shows up in Bangkok, Thailand to perform several
assassinations. But he quickly finds
love with a deaf-mute pharmacy worker.
He goes into her pharmacy after getting cut during an assassination so
that he can get disinfectant for his wound.
There’s a lady behind the cash who not only hears and speaks, but also
speaks English, but she figures fuck it and lets the deaf-mute handle the customer
service shit.
Cage manages to ask her out on a date and the movie starts getting
really funny. The deaf-mute seems to
find it pretty attractive to watch a pasty white dude with gross long black
hair sweating as a result of spicy food.
She rewards his sweating and his attempts at conversation which she
can’t hear, and couldn’t understand even if she could hear, by jumping up on a
stage and changing into a showgirl costume and dancing for him in a big chorus
number. I would think dancing would look
pretty ridiculous to a person who can’t hear music, but I can’t even figure out
what the fuck Cage’s arms are doing on the poster for this movie, so what do I
know? I think if Cage brought her back
to America he’d have to reciprocate by taking her to Medieval Times and jumping
out into the arena and killing some people.
They have other typical date moments such walking around holding
hands and getting interrupted by an elephant who wants bananas. The elephant comes back later in Cage’s
backyard when he’s disposing of some lethal assassin syringes and says thanks
for the bananas. What I wasn’t expecting
was the ‘meet the parents’ date to be covered in this film. It’s not every movie that a Thai deaf-mute
pharmacist showgirl brings her American hitman boyfriend home to meet her mum,
so the scene clearly represented a challenge.
But Cage seems to be the type of morose scraggly-haired hitman you
can bring home to mum. I think the
conversation would have rolled a bit smoother if Cage had had one of those
wacky movie hitman interests like how Tom Cruise in Collateral was a jazz aficionado and how Leon in Leon: The Professional was all into
Gene Kelly musicals. Plus, Cage is a
stylized hitman in this movie, he’s not one of these made-by-the-system Bourne
types. He’s got that long hair and later
in the movie he starts dressing like Zorro in black satin shirts and high
leather boots, so he should have a wacky hitman interest in snow globes or
unicorn sculptures or something. He
tries his hand at interior decorating by hanging a painting upside down and
later burning it, but I guess Feng Shui just wasn’t his bag.
But the meet the parents date was a key breakthrough in their
relationship since that’s when Cage actually learns the name of the woman he’s
been dating, not that she could hear him say it anyway, but it’s sure shorter
than Thai Deaf-Mute Pharmacist Showgirl when he’s talking to his friends about
her, that is if he had friends to listen him talk about the woman who couldn’t
hear him say her name if he did.
This film also defies convention when Cage takes on an apprentice
hitman. It was weird to see a movie
where the middle-aged golf shirt-wearing white American comes to Asia to teach
the buff young Asian guy martial arts.
There’s a really strange shot where it just looks like Cage is holding
his apprentice’s hands and loosely shaking them like their dancing and Cage is
looking off into space. Some of the
shots where they’re stretching also looked incredibly awkward. But you understand why Cage’s apprentice looks
up to him. The apprentice was just a
lowly pickpocket at the beginning of the film, so when he meets Cage and sees
he’s a pasty deadpan dude who spends his time sitting motionlessly zen on a
sofa (television off) with nothing to live for, it gives the apprentice guy an
idea of what he missed out on when he chose not to go to college. We get several Karate Kid montages of Cage teaching his apprentice (who’s name is
Kong) various fighting techniques such as punching and not getting punched,
although this film involves no fistfighting.
One of the fight training exercises involves Cage telling Kong to get a
beer and Cage spilling it all over the floor.
They also practice firing pistols at watermelons. Which makes me think this is why Cage looks
so skinny in this movie, he keeps destroying his food in training
exercises. I dunno, maybe in Bangkok
it’s offensive to shoot at empty bottles or something.
The film proceeds to have a series of shootouts and assassinations
that are pretty stylized, though nothing special, they’re at least pretty
gorey. The big shootout at the end fails
to reach Luc Besson levels of mayhem, but that’s okay. There was one part where they’re shooting each
other in a room with a red light and I figured it was a dark room for developing
photos and all the jugs of liquid they were shooting were photo developing
solution and they were going to spill out onto some photographs which would
then develop and reveal something, but it turns out these Thai gangsters just
keep their water in rooms with dark red lighting. Maybe the idea is to make the water look like
red Kool Aid to fool somebody or something.
And I’ll say the final ten minutes are baffling and the final shot
is completely mystifying, but I won’t tell you what happens. I honestly can’t believe this is the ending
that tested best with preview audiences, but I’m glad they went with it. Especially that final shot where I can’t tell
what it’s supposed to represent or when it’s supposed to be taking place. So overall this movie acted ridiculous for
most of its running time then turned wacky and confused me right at the end,
then told me to fuck off, so I can’t help but respect it. I’d be willing to give this movie almost full
Cage points, but with the recent unearthing of these long lost artefacts
(follow links below) I think The Study of Cage has been shaken to its
foundation.
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1fEnhawu_k
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=bZhciDUvnlY
If your mind isn’t gone like Pluto
after those above links, then there’s no way you followed them, so you probably
won’t follow these links to semi-related shit either:
As in the movie is titled ‘Next’, not that
Cage is next for something or this is his next something.
A
Robostripper Lindsay Lohan Production
Let’s reminisce about Tony Scott’s greatest film, shall we?