HOLLYWOOD -- Nicolas Cage didn't wind up in Bangkok by accident. As the Oscar-winning actor explains it, there were reasons both personal and professional that compelled him to change gears after the mega-dollar success of the family-friendly action-adventure National Treasure: Book of Secrets and travel across the globe in pursuit of a new career iteration. Not least was the impulse to shake up his image by appearing in a foreign-made film.
"On my path of film acting, I've been trying to think more and more internationally, trying to have a global mind," Cage said. "That means going to foreign countries and working with filmmakers who have a special point of view that will reinvent me in an alternative light."
Enter the Pang brothers, the Hong Kong-born action-horror hotshots responsible for the 2003 Chinese movie hit The Eye. A franchise-spawning horror movie about a woman whose corneal transplant causes her to see dead people, it was remade as a Jessica Alba vehicle earlier this year. Executives at the production company Blue Star Pictures had been courting the writer-director siblings Danny and Oxide Pang to remake their 1999 Thai-language hit, Bangkok Dangerous, for an American audience. And that's how Cage came to sign on to star in the ultra-violent action thriller (which is being distributed by Lionsgate and arrives in multiplexes today) as Joe, an assassin of few words who travels to Thailand's capital to carry out a series of contract killings.
The character falls under Bangkok's exotic thrall, drawn into a tentative romance with a comely deaf-mute pharmacy assistant. And he begins to question his isolated existence just as the mobsters who ordered his services decide to put Joe in the crosshairs.
With its unusual, hybridized pedigree, Bangkok Dangerous arrives as the latest in a long line of Asian-movie remakes -- a genre that seemed to peak around 2006. Dating all the way back to 1960's The Magnificent Seven, a western adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's classic action-drama The Seven Samurai, the genre has some notable hits: the 1998 update of Godzilla took in more than $136 million at the box office; Martin Scorsese's The Departed (a remake of the Hong Kong potboiler Infernal Affairs) grossed $132 million in theatres and won four Oscars, including best picture. But most Asian remakes turn out to be modest box-office performers.
"It is an Asian movie, not an American one," said Cage, who also produced Bangkok Dangerous. "We didn't want to make any concessions to the American audience and let the Pangs do anything they could to break from the American moviemaking formula. I place this one under the category of 'experimental.'"
-- Los Angeles Times
See tomorrow's Free Press for a review of Bangkok Dangerous.
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