Bangkok Dangerous (12)

You may get a sinking feeling at the begin-ning of Bangkok Dangerous when Nicolas Cage's voice-over lays out the rules of being an assassin. They're the rules about not asking questions and not getting involved with anyone – and if you're deflated when you hear them, that's because they're the same rules you hear at the beginning of every film about being an assassin: Vin Diesel recited them in last week's Babylon AD. They're also the very rules which you know will be broken before the film is over. And so it is that Bangkok Dangerous wastes no time in promising that it's going to be a clichéd genre movie about a cold-blooded murderer who learns not to be so cold-blooded. If nothing else, it keeps that promise.

It's a remake of a Thai movie from the same directors, the Pang Brothers. Another of their films, The Eye, has already been remade in Hollywood this year, so in theory Bangkok Dangerous should cement their international status. But it's so lazily mediocre that you'd think it was a homework assignment they did under protest before they were allowed out to play football.

Cage's character has no background, less personality than the Terminator, and nothing distinctive about him except his bizarre haircut. He decides to accept, yes, "one last job" before retirement, so he flies to Bangkok where he's employed by a similarly anonymous gangster to kill four even more anonymous men. He goes about his business in such a messy, conspicuous fashion that any local thug could have done it for a fraction of the price, but Bangkok Dangerous doesn't even have the adrenalin you'd expect. For the central half-hour of the film, the action is put on hold while Cage bonds with two of the natives. One of these is a sidekick who wants to be an assassin. Cage trains him in marksmanship, but sounds less like a contract killer than an instructor at a clay-pigeon shoot. "Don't pull the trigger," he says, as if imparting arcane wisdom. "Squeeze it." I wonder how long it took the screenwriter to research that one. And then there's Cage's risible, chaste romance with a deaf-mute pharmacist. The pains the screenwriter took over this relationship are evident in their conversation during a dinner date: she giggles while Cage tries the spicy food and says, "It's, uh, hot." And what kind of hitman has to go to a chemist's for antiseptic when he cuts his arm, anyway? Can't he pack his own Savlon?

Bangkok Dangerous is reasonably competent, and it has some of the visual flair of the directors' earlier films – ie, everything looks a bit hazy – but that doesn't explain what an Oscar winner is doing in the lead role. Considering that he's already made two films with John Woo, why sign up with a pair of John Woo wannabes, in a part that would have been done better by Jason Statham or Steven Seagal? The answer becomes clear whenever Cage strips off his motorcycle leathers to show off his tight vest and well-oiled biceps. Bangkok Dangerous isn't so much a film as a very public mid-life crisis.