Okay, before I tear into this movie, I should mention that I’m actually a pretty big Nicholas Cage fan. But like John Travolta, Nicholas Cage has a lot of die-hard fans and a lot of people who can’t stand him and relatively little in between. But love him or hate him, he’s just not a serious action star, despite constantly starring in action movies. He’s like a slighly more Hollywood-ized version of Jean Claude Van Damme (another of my personal heroes, of course), with slightly less punching.

Once again, Cage plays a role that doesn’t even remotely fit him - an ultra-lonely assassin who’s work carries him all around the world but prevents the development of any kind of social life, romantic or otherwise. Oh, and it also comes with all sorts of rules, which he is nice enough to narrate for us, such as “never get involved with anyone outside of work.” For those of you who can’t read between the smoking bullet holes, that means don’t get involved with anyone at any time ever. Because the only people he ever interacts with in person at work are the people that he kills.

That being said, it’s interesting the decision to cast Nicholas Cage in this role. He is known for playing

Hi, you don't know me, and I'm sorry to interrupt your dinner, but would you mind helping me kill four people?

guys who are down on their luck or involved in some kind of criminal scheme but with a heart of gleaming gold. And he does that here, but he also viciously kills a lot of people, which is uncharacteristic for him.

On what he swears is going to be his One Last Job (which is not the only disappointing cliche that Bangkok Dangerous has in common with last week’s Righteous Kill), he is heading to Thailand to carry out four high profile killings in the same location, but for this particular job he needs some assistance, so he approaches a young man who displays the skills needed by cleverly stealing some tourist’s wallet. Reluctantly, the gutter punk accepts, after a bout of obligatory bargaining.

And by the way, I never understand why people in movies react the way they do when offered a job to do some little thing and get paid like $2,000 a day. They’re always raising their eyebrows and doubting and bargaining and squinting their eyes and thinking and hesitating and debating. Personally I would just pick myself up off the floor and ask when I start. Unless I had to kill someone. Then I guess I would ask for more. I mean hesitate. I would hesitate.

Another boring day at the office.

Anyway, through a series of contrived scenes, their tenuous relationship grows miraculously stronger as we watch in confusion as Joe (Cage) systematically breaks all of the rules that he explained to us at the beginning of the movie. At the same time as he is trying to train Kong, his Thai helper, he is also falling desperately in love with a mute Thai woman who works at a local pharmacy.

The girl is cute and has a powerful charm, but watching Cage transform into a babbling schoolboy whenever she’s around sort of takes a little of the conviction away when he tries to look scary later. The Thai love interest is played by Chinese actress Charlie Yeung, who gives a good performance despite the romantic subplot being wildly out of place. The movie halts in its tracks so abruptly and so completely every time she appears that you can almost smell the brakes burning. And you can definitely hear them.

This is the badass piece of machinery that Nicholas Cage uses to race back and forth between the two totally incompatible movies in Bangkok Dangerous.

The other half of the movie is the one about the killings and the Thai sidekick, with Cage quite literally zooming back and forth between the two plots on a cool BMW motorcycle. I’m guessing that the sheer badassedness of these bikes is supposed to be distracting enough so that we don’t wonder why this guy, who’s been in Bangkok for a matter of days, has a whole stable of them at his disposal. Oh, and he also gives one to Kong, who shrugs and offers a half grin when tossed the keys. I love the gratitude!

Similar to Righteous Kill, however, by far the most disappointing thing about the movie is the ending, which doesn’t stop delivering the disappointment when it culminates in a shootout that takes place - you guessed it - in an old abandoned warehouse. I’m at a loss to explain why this scene is still being tacked onto the endings of action movies. This is the 21st century, for god’s sake. Maybe the locations are free to use. Whatever the case may be, such a climax hasn’t been exciting in untold decades. In the last 30 minutes of the movie, I fell asleep literally like half a dozen times.

But wait, there’s more. Remember the astonishing forehead-slapper that closed Babylon A.D.? Well, if you read my review you probably didn’t bother with the movie, but Bangkok Dangerous also comes with a closing shot that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, serving no real purpose but to provide a bit of footage that can be run at slow motion and make for a nice fade out before the credits.

Failed movie titles - "An American Cowboy in Thailand."

There are a lot of roles that Nicholas Cage can do really well. He was perfect in The Rock, he inhabited his roles in Adaptation and Matchstick Men, and he even played a good investigator highly disturbed at his subject in 8mm, but here we’re expected to identify with this guy who is having conflictions about being given an assignment to kill a politician who happens to be a good man. It creates a confusing feeling when we’re expected to aspire to the moral high-ground of a contract killer.

But most of all, for all of Cage’s strengths, he just can not do emotions and he can not do romance. Not ever. Remember that movie Next from last year? Holy crap. There was a scene where I thought I was wrong about the romance thing, it was incredible. He says to this woman something like, “The definition of beauty is that all things are arranged in such a way so that nothing needs to be added, changed, or taken away. And that’s you…you’re beautiful.”

That second sentence is a little obvious and redundant, I should think, but still not bad. But then he goes and blows it completely with this stupid magic trick. He woos her with these sweet words, and then he’s like, hey baby, wanna see me pull a magic rose out of my hat?

Dumbass!

In Bangkok Dangerous a good third of the movie is him with this goofy grin on his face, trying to think of something clever to say to this girl that can’t hear him or talk to him, and the rest of the movie he’s trying to get out of the assassination business while reluctantly training a young man to get into it as their relationship grows stronger. What? The numerous narrative directions are crazily inconsistent and incompatible. It commits the age old crime of trying to please too broad of an audience, and will probably end up pleasing no one.