Bangkok Dangerous Rehashes Hitman Stereotypes

By Connect2Mason Reporter Emily Culley

Bangkok Dangerous is the classic hitman tale of a man reaching the end of his career and on his way out of the anonymous, isolated life. Joe (Nicholas Cage) is determined to go out with a bang in a series of four serious hits from a crime lord Surat. Joe hires out a kid from the streets to run his errands, with the intention of killing him off at the end of the job.

As Joe begins this job, he runs down a list of rules. Rule Num. 4 is: Know when to get out. According to Joe, you know when to get out when you question whether it's time to get out.

On the plane ride to Bangkok, Joe gets distracted by a whiny child and knows that this mission must be his last. He must get out before they get him. Despite his errand boy's constant mistakes and tardiness, Joe sees himself in the kid named Kong and takes him under his wings to show him how to be a hitman.

On the outside of the murders, Joe begins to fall for a local deaf woman who works in an all-night pharmacy. Joe's downfall begins there; once he begins slipping, he plummets to the bottom.

He goes through scene after scene of never ending bullet shots, and towards the end of the movie there is montage after montage of gun fights. The gun fights go past ridiculous and reach a new level of absurdity, leaving me to wonder how it was possibly for one dazed man to walk through and kill an entire fleet of underlings of a high powered crime boss and end up with only a few lesions?

The film follows the predictable plot line of all terribly overacted hitman movies, the story of a emotionally sterile man coming to terms with the death trail he created. All of the stereotypical spots were hit and then taken to a new level. Instead of a gory car chase, there is a ridiculous boat chase leading up to a disgusting end.

The only times the movie leaves the standard plot line it crosses the ridiculous, passes the absurd, and heads straight for the disturbing or disgusting. Maybe had it stopped at the absurd, the movie would still have been entertaining—similar to the way that Bruce Willis's Die Hard series becomes comical at a certain point. But it didn't, and the movie left me feeling uncomfortable and with a major headache. D.