Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

(In theaters, September 2008) It takes a lot of misguided skill to make a boring film about Nicolas Cage as a gifted assassin, but that’s exactly what this weakly-brewed action thriller ends up being. Cage looks asleep as a weary assassin coming to Thailand for one last series of jobs. Inexplicably, he lets down his usual safeguards, befriend a small-time hustler, romances a deaf local girl, botches his contracts and ends up hunted down by his own clients. There is one single flash of interest late in the film as he fends off killers while his date isn’t looking, but otherwise the film is one single monolith of exasperation. Hampered by cookie-cutter action scenes, trite dialog, glacial pacing and a complete lack of originality, Bangkok Dangerous fuses the worst of Asian and Western cinema to produce something that the whole world will unite to recognize as a bad film.