‘BANGKOK DANGEROUS’

RATING: 4/10

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Shahkrit Yamnarm, Charlie Yeung

The Plot: Joe (Cage), an assassin, travels to Bangkok for his last four hits before retiring. While there, he breaks his own “assassin rules” by befriending a scam artist (Yamnarm) and falling for a woman (Yeung).

The Good: Though Yamnarm is relatively unknown in the U.S., he gives a scene-stealing performance as Kong, Joe’s messenger. Yamnarm is able to take a sleazy, one-dimensional character and transform him into a layered one that makes the audience wish he had more scenes. Luckily, as the movie plays out, his role becomes bigger and more important to the story.

The entire film is light with dialogue, which is good because this saves it from itself.

Considering how most of the movie sticks close to mediocre action movie cliches, more dialogue would have only meant more corny lines.

The Bad: For an action movie, “Bangkok Dangerous” was action-less for the first 50 minutes. Joe did take on a few hits before that mark, but they were unimaginative.

The “big” battle at the end of the movie also left much to be desired. It consisted of nothing more than guys simply falling down from apparent gunshots.

The love story between Joe and Fon (Yeung) is very generic and does not go any deeper than him thinking she is pretty. Small spoiler alert: she is deaf (but it has nothing to do with the story), and that just makes the dates more excruciating because he just spouts lame one-liners while she giggles.

The Lowdown: “Bangkok Dangerous” is a cookie-cutter action movie that does not do anything particularly well.

The action that does start off the movie, slows down considerably and does not pick up again until the last half-hour.

Even the parts that involve gun battles are uninspired and are outdone by TV shows like “24.”

One of the few things the movie has going for it is Yamnarm. His charm and charisma help pick up the often slow and predictable story.

The ending, however, did have a small twist. It was not earth-shattering, but considering what happened the 90 minutes before, it was an incredibly creative move.