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.

So Jason Statham is by now one of the biggest action stars in the world. He reminds me of a young Bruce Willis, although he’s had his share of hits and misses. Death Race is what I would call a critical disaster, because it has nothing but action and carnage. This thing is thin on everything - plot, story, acting, characters, etc. But what else would you expect from a movie with a title like Death Race? It’s fast, loud, vulgar, and violent, and as far as I’m concerned that’s all that it promises. Works for me.

It seems that in the distant future, the American economy is in shambles, inflation is through the roof, and things have gotten so bad with prison over-crowding that, now that they’re run for profit by private corporations, they have resorted to allowing inmates to kill each other off in webcasted death races. And by “distant future,” of course, I mean that the movie takes place in far-off 2012. If nothing else, Death Race certainly has little faith in whoever will turn out to be our next president.

My problem with the movie is that it leaves you with the feeling that a better movie is taking place outside the prison. The movie is essentially an advertisement for the inevitable video game, so I’m willing to accept the ludicrous premise about giving our most hardcore future-criminals heavily armed, high-powered vehicles, but I’m more interested in seeing what’s going on in America where the United States military has decided that the best use for their mounted machine guns, laser-guided, armor-piercing RPGs, rocket launchers, and nothing less than napalm, would be to put them in the hands of prison inmates so they can kill each other off for the purpose of online entertainment.

But therein you have your message to America about the American economy and our place in the world. Our economy has crashed, so clearly we’re no longer the world’s #1 superpower. The races are sold to the public for a whopping $250 per race (which, given our economic situation, must be a mostly foreign audience), and since they regularly pull in tens of millions of viewers, evidently America has been reduced in the world to a source of violent entertainment.

Then again, I’m probably reading far too deeply into the material than was intended. They do, after all, bus in teams of stunningly hot female co-pilots for no decipherable reason. I’m not sure which is a more dangerous thing to bring in to a prison, rocket launchers and napalm or hot women.

But of course what really matters is the cars and the carnage and there’s plenty of both. Many of the modifications make no sense, like the 6-inch steel armor plate on the back of Statham’s Mustang, which must weigh double what the car weighs, but for full-throttle violence and mayhem you can hardly do better than this.

But if there is one thing that I’ll have a hard time forgiving the movie for, it’s the way the weapons are activated. Joan Allen made a surprising career decision in taking a major role in this movie, which leaves her little to do except be a cold, heartless wench and call for manhole-sized buttons on the track to be turned on and off. Sort of like the little prizes and things that you have to run over on the track in order to get enhanced weapons.

The original Death Racers...

The similarity to old Nintendo games is a little too much for comfort. Also, remember how if you hit one of those little oil patches your car would go spinning wildly into the wall? That happens here, too.

Ultimately the movie raises an interesting moral debate, whether or not it’s worth it to give violent criminals a chance to win their freedom if they manage to bring some money into the ailing economy and kill off a few of their fellow hardened criminals in the process.

The movie is basically The Fast and the Furious without all the shiny prettiness of it. The cars are not high-powered speed-racers, they are assault weapons with wheels and untold horsepower, and aesthetic appeal is unimportant compared to sheer power of destruction. I was a little disappointed to see that the movie didn’t have the narrative drive of something like Crank or The Transporter, it’s a watered-down Statham action movie.

Must...look...angry!!

He’s got a tremendous screen presence, showcased best in Snatch, I think, but all he’s given to do here is look pissed behind the wheel and periodically kick the crap out of some skinheads. You may rediscover that you enjoy seeing white supremacists get their asses kicked, and if you are interested in deadly car racing you may enjoy this one. But given that most half-baked action flicks of this variety tend to spawn endless sequels (4 fast 4 Furious is on its way, for example), I just hope that Death Race 2: Full Throttle takes place on the mainland.