Rann:  I actually wasn’t very keen on seeing this movie. Nicholas Cage hasn’t had a project that made me feel really excited in awhile, excluding Ghost Rider which turned out to be pretty “eh” with some “ha!” mixed in. The previews essentially made it out to be a watered-down version of his previous movie Lord of War, perhaps with a bit of action thrown in. But Gerbera Tetra was keen to see it and held his breath until I agreed to as well, though now that I think about it that bastard was probably breathing through his nose.

First, let me make it clear, whoever cut the previews for this movie should be fired. They are incompetent. The previews do absolutely nothing to show you what a badass action flick this is… hell, whoever begged his uncle for a job and was given a disproportionate salary to make the trailers seemed more interested in Cage’s (admittedly rather bad) haircut than in giving you any kind of idea what sort of movie it is.

Let me put it this way, it’s an action movie that could easily stand up alongside a height-of-summer blockbuster for fun with guns and explosions, but in a way the movie is an interesting parallel to when it’s released, at the end of summer. Because it has lots of guns and explosions and some nice hand-to-hand fights too, but it’s also slightly slower-paced and rather more thoughtful than a full-fledged stereotypical blockbuster.

You know what Christopher Nolan did for Batman? Brought him a bit more down to Earth, made him more real, more human? Showed us not a ridiculously overtrained renaissance man who knew everything and could pull any necessary gadget out of his Bat-Ass Of Holding, but instead a well-trained fighter embarking on his career with all of the pitfalls and learning that came with it? That’s what Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun do with the character archetype of the super-assassin in Bangkok Dangerous, with the small twist of showing us the end of his career instead of the beginning.

Cage’s highly experienced and highly skilled assassin isn’t some top of the class human killing machine capable of rambling at will in any language, leaping into a room and killing twenty people instantly with the guns in both hands, and taking a piece of fishing wire, the filling from one of his teeth, and a dingleberry and turning it into a small nuclear explosive. He’s a badass, to be sure, but he’s a very realistic, human badass, which makes it all the more impressive when he does pull this shit off. I mean, after awhile it stops being impressive when Jason Bourne pulls off his Secret Ops Jesus bits… still cool and rather exciting, but you’re just not impressed anymore because, hey, you expect him to constantly be one-upping himself with all the shit he knows and crap he can do. Since Joe seems more of a “normal” human, you can still be impressed because wow, you thought he’d gone all out before and here he is pushing himself harder and being just that much more cool than before.

The movie isn’t without its flaws, being at points somewhat predictable and a little cliche, but it makes up for them by breaking as many of the standards as it plays straight. It’s well-written, well directed, and at times honestly thoughtful. The movie intersplices flashbacks and “present” shots in such a way that it’s sometimes hard to judge which is which, something that gets tried often enough and rarely succeeds, but it works nicely here. Cage turns in an honestly (and somewhat surprisingly) nuanced performance, painting a character who is at once a detached, ruthless killer, and at the same time Cage’s somewhat awkward Nice Guy, and makes them both seem real; this isn’t someone who’s one way all the time and putting on some mask to be something else, but someone who is different things by turns. Yes, when he’s working, he’s a cold, distant, ruthless assassin. But when dealing with someone who’s not part of that world, he acts differently because he’s feeling different things. There’s no sense of flicking a switch from one to the other, which helps with the “realness” of it.

Bangkok Dangerous is definitely worth seeing, and don’t let the mediocre trailers put you off. There’s definitely a lot more to this movie than Nicholas Cage’s hair.