A lean, loud gnarly self-remake

The Pang twins have done a Hollywood remake of their own 1999 film about a solitary hit man who gets into deep trouble when he becomes less solitary. Nicolas Cage plays Joe, the hit man. Things are different from the original, which being entirely in Chinese and Thai, had no Americans wandering around in it. But what remains consistent is a chilly, acid blue look, a bleak world view, and a style that is admirably lean and focused. I love the name Oxide; it evokes the look of the Pang's films. In their The Eye, their style was hauntingly hallucinatory. That one had an inferior US remake by somebody else; no such trouble here. This movie is thoroughly enjoyable, if you don't mind the occasional severed limb or trunk. The Pang's material is limited, but they're in excellent control of it and direct with urgent forward momentum. And urgent fatalism: the wages of sin is death. The Pangs are the artiest of committed B-picture filmmakers.

In the original version the hit man is Kong, and he's deaf from childhood. He can be a killer partly because he can't hear the shots. He goes to a drug store and meets a pretty young woman who can communicate with him using sign language and a relationship develops. How sad it is when one day she discovers her gentle, sensitive boyfriend is a killer. The same thing happens here but it's the girl, Fon (Charlie Yeung) who is mute, not Joe. Since this more expensive film is noisier than the original Bangkok Dangerous, I missed the moments of intense silence it had. The soundtrack is rather too relentless. But relentless isn't altogether undesirable in a movie of this kind. You don't really ever want it to stop.

Joe (Cage) comes to Bangkok to carry out a series of four hits for unseen, unknown bosses. Kong (Thai actor Shahkrit Yamnarm) is Joe's messenger, who picks up assignments and payoffs. While in the original version Kong was the teacher, this time he's the younger man who offers himself to be taught by Joe. This is a lethal, more grownup version of the Karate Kid.

Everything about the situation contradicts what Joe says is the hit man code: befriend no one, remain secret, do your job and get out leaving nothing behind. He immediately befriends Kong and the girl; and Kong befriends the nightclub go-go girl he picks up Joe's instructions from and she becomes his girlfriend.

But what is right, is Cage's style. He has long greasy hair and a manner and look that combine haggard and steely; he almost looks Asian, and when he tries to blend into a Bangkok crowd it's convincing. He's turning into David Carradine, Tarantino's "Snake Charmer Bill": Caine, "walking the earth." Bangkok Dangerous is rich in what it has to offer: nihilism and violence. This being a bigger budget, there are more crowds, explosions, expensive motorcycles--lots of high speed chases in expensive motorcycles.

The Pang twins work seriatim, when they work together (they've also worked apart). That is, first one directs a scene, then the other directs the next scene, and so on. Being twins, they think alike--yet independently. This is an aesthetics of violence. It's all blue, then yellow, and one scene is shot all in red. It's utterly beautiful, and despite the noise and the American star, austere. I even thought of the Melville classic, Le Samourai. Alain Delon might not recognize himself in Nicolas Cage, but there is the same lack of affect. Purists may scorn Cage for World Trade Center and the National Treasure franchise. But he still verges often on interesting projects--e.g., Windtalkers, Matchstick Men, The Wicker Man, The Weather Man, Lord of War (the latter a sort of preparation for this), and most importantly Kaufman's brilliant mind-bender Adaptation. Cage works too much, you can say, but his B-pictures are (mostly) good ones--or self-consciously, archly B B-pictures, like the Fu Manchu episode in Grindhouse (also an ironic preparation for this movie). It's because Cage is a Hollow Man that he is perfect for this doomed role. Clive Owen would have ruined it.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.