Bangkok Dangerous (2008) : The Lonely Lone Gunman [Mike’s Review]
Today on Cage Club we have one last assignment to do in Bangkok Dangerous. Here we have another remake for Cage Club and we are no strangers to remakes here. City Of Angels, Gone In 60sec, Wicker Man and now Bangkok Dangerous. One thing that all Cage remakes seem to have in common is that they don’t follow the original very close and become more of a reimagining of the source material. This time around the Pang Brothers, directors of the original Bangkok Dangerous, are back and have crafted a type of companion piece film or a spiritual sequel of sorts to the original movie rather than a full on remake. Like the original, most of the elements are here only they are reassigned to different characters. This makes for an interesting experience of you have seen the original and keeps this from feeling like a boring, retread of the source material.
Cage plays an assassin named Joe who is a lone gunman that is ready to hang up his holster. Being the best hitman has meant sacrificing everything else in his life and he can not move forward being alone anymore. He swears to himself that this trip to Bangkok will be his last job ever and then he’s out, the only problem is that the life may not be ready for him to give it up. Joe has a few rules that helped him survive which basically boil down to don’t trust anyone and never get too close to someone. He starts to break theses rules over the course of the film as if he’s already partially checked out of the assassin life and want’s to jumpstart his new life after. Joe hires an assistant, Kong, like he always does to navigate a strange city. He’s a low level street smart con artist that nobody will miss if things get too hot and Joe has to ice him. When Kong screws up, instead of reprimanding him or killing him, Joe takes him on as a protege, training him in the arts of the gunman. Joe also develops a flirtation with a deaf pharmacist named Fon who shows kindness to him. They pursue a romanic relationship that transcends the human voice and are able to communicate with broken sign language. All this is great, but Joe forgets that he still has a job to do and it’s not exactly going to be a walk in the park. The hits are very much not the focus of the movie, rather serving as a backdrop for the dramatic relationships to grow and develop. There is a great scenes when Joe and Fon are mugged in the park and Joe kills them on instance scaring the hell out of Fon. This is a nice way of showing how different these two people’s worlds actually are and how hard, if not impossible, it would be for Joe to live a normal life. If he can’t even suppress his actions when he is with the one he loves, how would he expect to drop all these years of killer instinct and navigate a world outside of one driven by violence? When the people who hired Joe to kill all these men kidnap Kong to ensure the job is done, Joe puts his life on the line to save his new friend. He has had enough and goes on a massive shootout to reduce his friend and take down the crime boss that hired him for his last series of jobs. In the end Joe decides to take himself out of the equation knowing that he will never be good for anything other than being an assassin. He shoots himself and the boss at the same time the first actual on screen suicide of a Cage character. Well, he was slowly killing himself by drinking himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas, but this is different. This is quick and seemingly not premeditated, totally derived from the situation he’s in at the moment. Joe realizes he won’t be able to function on the real world and that the last job he will pull should be on himself.
I enjoyed this film more than most remakes I have seen, but I was ready to hate this film. I have been a fan of the original movie and despite the drastic differences between the two, I feel like they both work really well and almost serve as companion pieces to each other. The original movie is almost the opposite of this film. Kong is a deaf and mute hitman that’s trained by Joe, but when Joe was shot in the hand and couldn’t do anymore jobs, Kong took over as the main source of income. Kong is the best and even travels to China to perform a hit. When he returns with the flu he meets the girl at the pharmacy who os in intrigued by the deaf mute and they become involved. A lot of the film plays out the same way, but the elements are all mixed up and reassigned. It feels like the original is Kong’s journey and the Remake is Joe’s journey and the filmmakers sexed the chance to tell the same story from the perspective of these two friends that ultimately become close like brothers. I feel like both films are worth seeking out and are different enough to sand on their own, but you can definitely see the DNA shared by both if you watched them both.
That does it for this installment of Cage Club. Next up we get back to Science Fiction with a crazy, over the top, big budget end of the world mystery, action, alien thriller with Knowing ! Cage gets a premonition and nobody seems to believe him. Can he do anything to save the world or is it all preordained ?
Mike
@the_mikestir
