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Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

Director: Danny Pang, Oxide Pang

Time Out rating

Average user rating

3 reviews

Synopsis

Nicolas Cage stars a hit man who develops a crisis of conscience in the Pang brothers' remake of their 1999 film.

Movie review

From Time Out London

‘Bangkok Dangerous’ arrives on these shores trailed by terrible Stateside reviews, one of the worst marketing campaigns in recent memory and the kind of advance word-of-mouth usually reserved for Thai prison parolees. A remake of an Asian actioner, the film follows Nicolas Cage’s taciturn hitman as he struggles to get out of the assassination game.

The surprise is that it’s really not that bad: it’s punchy and efficiently directed, and in those brief moments where Cage drops the grimace and stops shooting people he reminds us what a likeable actor he was before action heroism beckoned. None of this compensates for the overfamiliar plotline, the underdeveloped side characters, the breakbeat soundtrack, the boring shootouts and a general air of overbaked silliness. But it helps.

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time Out London Issue 1986, 11-17 Sept

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User reviews of this film

ubcool said...

Posted on Jan 04 2009 00:41 breakbeat soundtrack? dont remember that?
the score i thought was very well done compared with the rest of the movie.

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on Sep 09 2008 21:59 If there was any doubt in my mind about what kind of tourists frequent bangkok they disappeared after being lost in that metropolis trying to find the Emerald temple & the flower market ,which is the only place you can meet any real people who will all be naive tourists comprising mostly western women and old men .
The reasons why cage decides to go to bang-kok in his old age are thus clear as he wants a made-to-order asian female sex slave as well as a servant boy to serve his aging old western stud who refuses to bend to the will of nature and time ,that he achieves both the goals of his hazardous mission so promptly came as no surprise to me as you can buy anything that is not the real thing in bangkok whether it is second generation clones of louis vuitton or a fake dummy of julia roberts .
Now the plot was rather thin as it had been on a thai diet for a fortnight or whatever it took to make this slight misadventure but the execution made the city look even more clumsy and filthy then it is in virtual reality and that goes to say that this was meant to look like a futuristic los angeles out of the Matrix.
Never mind as cage does some seriously bad acrobatics that make even ghost rider look alive and healthy and his face looks like a ghost from the past with more wrinkles then in a shrivelled mango skin from bangkok.
By the time cage has has stopped banging bangkok with the excessively loud bangs meant to be explosive action ,i had forgotten all about the last 4 movies or nightmares he has made ,since he has no idea how to age gracefully ,he needs to be put in a cage for real and what better place then he selected with his freedom of choice -BANGKOK.
- jbz7879

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Matt said...

Posted on Sep 07 2008 12:28 Looking distinctly like every "out of the orient" b-movie ever, the plot has been seen time and time again, the characters are one dimensional at best and to say that Cage is a star in this movie is somewhat over-egging what he achieves as the hit-man with a conscience. Every half decent moment (one of them) from the movie is in the trailer, so just download that and save yourself the price of admission.

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