/////// 10tonfunk

and even if you could, why would you want to?

(just look at that punem! on the movie box this picture randomly has the Eiffel Tower in the background)

I’m something of an authority on the world’s worst movies (see my post on the Dennis Rodman instant classic “Minis”) and yet I could barely watch “Bangkok Dangerous.” And now I’ve seen it twice.

It’s not just a bad movie, no, it’s way past that. It’s an anti-movie. Consider this — normally an action movie has:

action
an action hero
an action hero with a “haircut”
a sizzling relationship btw said hero and some random girl

“Bangkok Dangerous” has Cage: looking like fat Elvis strung out on heroin, clearly covered head to toe in Vic’s Vapo-rub, wearing the same poorly fitting T-shirt in 70% of the scenes possibly not even realizing he’s making a movie. We suspect the movie may actually be cobbled together out of footage of him wandering drunkenly around the set and around Bangkok.

The action is replaced with blurry shots of water and total blackouts when they couldn’t even swing that. Cage’s hair is like Bill Murray’s at the end of “Kingpin” only in earnest.

One review says it’s like being locked in a coffin for 90 minutes. Wrong. It’s like being locked in a coffin with a half-dead Cage who’s going through some kind of gnarly withdrawal, clammy as hell, and already rapidly decomposing. Also, there are bugs crawling all over you.

The whole drugged out effect is heightened by my slightly blurry Russian bootleg. Right in the middle of the hand sex scene between Cage and his deaf girlfriend (yup, that’s right) two guys get up and walk out. Cuz they hate it? No. They come back a few minutes later — they were clearly just overwhelmed by the amazingness of the whole thing. Or maybe the sexy sign language was just too much for them.

Cage, in the least inspiring action performance ever witnessed (the picture below is the most badass he looks in the entire movie), seems to be reading his lines off a cue card the entire time (sadly, he forgoes his trademark southern “accent” — this may be his achilles heel or Sasmsonesque weakness — cut off his accent, cut off his lifeforce and turn him into a ghostlike specter that haunts the entire movie and makes it unbearably creepy) and during “action scenes” he clearly flubs some of his lines: what was probably supposed to be a witty line before he kills a guy turns into a hurried, “okaybye.”

I can’t believe that everyone in the movie didn’t choose to go the Buddhist monk route and self-immolate while clutching the film in their laps. The movie is already a remake of a Thai movie of the same name from two years ago which received pretty crappy reviews to begin with. It’s entirely possible we will see a third incarnation of this “movie.” Cage “produced” version 2.0, mostly likely as a way to get some quality R&R land in Thailand, and there may be a Redux in the future, complete with an “Apocalypse Now” “Heart of Darkness”-style documentary about the epic binges Cage went on during the 15 years it took to take the movie, and how the Thai army kept disappearing with the helicopters in the middle of shoots. To quote Nu Shooz… I can’t wait.

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This entry was posted by fred dintenfass on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 8:18 pm. It is filed under HI Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.