2010's Dour and Disappointing Bangkok Dangerous Marked an Unfortunate Turning Point in Nicolas Cage's Career
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
I am perpetually amazed by the unexpected commonalities in the careers of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. On the episode of Travolta/Cage that I am about to record we cover two weirdly simpatico nonentities from both actors’ lean years in Bangkok Dangerous and From Paris With Love.
In each film, a Face/Off star plays a man of violence who travels to various cities and countries throughout the world murdering people for profit and, in Travolta’s case art least, for fun as well.
Like the actor playing him, Travolta’s trigger-happy CIA hotshot is having a goddamn blast being as flashy and obnoxious and cartoonishly violent as possible.
2010’s Bangkok Dangerous makes the perverse, regrettable choice not to be fun. The film takes its morose tone from Cage’s regrettable lead performance as a Nowhere Man grasping for one last shot at redemption.
Where From Paris with Love empowered its scenery-chewing star to be himself to the Nth degree Bangkok Dangerous fatally misunderstands Cage’s appeal. The role of Joe, international hitman on the go, neuters Cage’s extraordinary charisma and free-floating eccentricity.
It’s a role devoid of energy or life, vulgarity or the divine madness Cage brings to damn near every other performance. The hushed intensity and deep underlying sadness of Cage’s performance was infinitely more successful and appropriate in The Matchstick Men, which Bangkok Dangerous resembles in ways that border on uncanny.
Both films are about career criminals who are very good at what they do (crime) and terrible at everything else, particularly anything involving people and emotions. I’m the same, except that I write about shitty movies like Bangkok Dangerous instead of killing people.
In Matchstick Men and Bangkok Dangerous, a sad loner who has chosen to separate himself from the rest of humanity for professional reasons and self-preservation open themselves up to the joy and meaning of human communication and connection through an ambitious professional sidekick and a mysterious woman.
In Bangkok Dangerous Cage plays a veteran hitman who plans to retire after doing four last jobs in Bangkok. In narration Joe helpfully explains that Bangkok is dirty, corrupt and dense so not only does he murder people for a living, and murder anyone he considers loose ends, but he’s also a goddamn racist.
Anywho, this racist murderer is our hero because he’s white and straight and played by a major movie star but also because the movie shares his racist, xenophobic conception of its titular city as a sleazy, sordid den of sin and amorality filled with pushers and pimps and bad men who will do anything to maintain power and/or hide their sins.
Joe has devoted his life to contract killing and casual racism but also to avoiding any and all human connections, professional, personal or otherwise. He’s a ghost, a specter, without a family or home.
Being near the end of his career as an assassin and also a protagonist in a movie that requires a redemptive moral arc, that all pretty much goes out the window once he arrives in Bangkok.
Joe encounters a street hustler named Kong (Shahkrit Yammam) he inexplicably takes a liking to and decides to teach him everything that he knows, to become his caucasian sensei.
Pretty much everything Joe knows involves how to fuck up strangers so he teaches his eager young protege martial arts and how to shoot.
It’s a dynamic that recalls Cage’s relationship with Sam Rockwell in Matchstick Men enough to suffer terribly by comparison.
The suddenly very social professional executioner falls in love with deaf pharmacist Fon (Charlie Yeung). In the original Bangkok Dangerous, which was released in 1999 and marked the directorial debut of The Pang Brothers, who also direct the remake, the hitman character was deaf-mute.
The filmmakers understandably thought it would be a goddamn shame to silence a world-class talker like Cage so they made his love interest deaf instead. John Woo would have been able to pull off a wildly melodramatic development like that. The same is true of Douglas Sirk but in the hands of the Pang Brothers the romance is chaste and underwhelming, sentimental and maudlin instead of poignant.
Cage produced Bangkok Dangerous in addition to starring in it so this was clearly a project he felt passionately about. With Bangkok Dangerous Cage wanted to elevate violent genre schlock to the level of art, to create a melodrama about honor and regret, second chances and redemption.
Bangkok Dangerous takes itself VERY seriously. It has deluded itself into thinking that it’s an action movie with substance and ideas when it’s just another forgettable, generic shoot em up. The muddled remake thinks it has class when really it’s pure trash.
This is certainly not the first bad movie Cage has made. But it nevertheless marks an unfortunate turning point for the actor. As always, Cage is going for something with his dour portrayal of a sad man facing the end of his career as a killer for hire yet nothing he or the movie does works at all. Cage swings for the fences and whiffs completely.
Cage might have come to Bangkok Dangerous as an A-list, Academy Award-winning thespian full of ambition and ideas but he left it a B-list action hero. That’s a regrettable identity he’s spent the ensuing years fighting with increasing success thanks in no small part to his willingness to embrace roles completely antithetical to the one he plays here.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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