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‘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.