Who’s In It: Nicolas Cage, Shahkrit Yamnarm
The Basics: Nicolas Cage is a lone wolf hit man who leaves no trace when the job is done. That means you’d better not cross his path or get to know him for more than the time it takes to ask where the nearest Arby’s is located or else you may get disappeared after his latest kill. So what happens here is that he meets a young protégé who—begin yawning here, it’s okay—reminds him of himself when he was younger. He also gets his heart stolen by a deaf mute pharmacist lady. I know, best kind of person to fall in love with, right? Can’t talk back and will get you all the Xanax you could ever want. Then he goes and kills some people and makes Bangkok a very dangerous place.
What’s The Deal: I’m trying to figure out if this movie is boring due to accidental awful directing (by a man named Oxide, so yes, points for that) and producing (by Cage) and screenwriting (by whoever, I don’t care) or if it was cleverly designed to be boring because that’s the way a real hit man’s life would be if we could ever see a documentary about that kind of thing. Because think about it: if your job was murder and you needed anonymity you wouldn’t be running around being chased on boats or having stuff explode around you constantly, correct? You probably wouldn’t even live in a showy, architecturally interesting house, no matter how rich you were, because then Elle Décor would just be bugging you all the time to do a cover shoot. But yeah, this one is a snooze. And I liked Ghost Rider and Next. So it’s not due to anti-Cage-ian bias.
Which Bad Guy? Oh, That Bad Guy. No, Wait, That Other Bad Guy: This movie would have been awesome if all the other characters had been animatronic like Abe Lincoln at the Disneyland Hall of Presidents. Because it’s not like you wind up knowing or caring about who he’s killing or why. The deaths come and go like ducks at a carnival shooting gallery. And when he’s assigned to kill a non-bad guy and has a crisis of conscience it still doesn’t matter because no negative weight was assigned to his first round of cold-blooded murders. He might as well use his protégé and the pharmacist woman for target practice, too. I think I’m on to something with the animatronics thing here. Wouldn’t that be good to see? Cage acting with a bunch of actual robots? After he wraps Kick-Ass he should do that.
Gratuitous T&A Scenes That Wind Up Sparking Actual Life in the Film: They all take place in this Bangkok discotheque and involve big stages filled with bikini girls dancing to the same crappy electronic music. But these scenes totally take you out of the movie because you start thinking, “What’s life like for the third woman from the left in the front?” And then you think about what would happen if Sofia Coppola had just taken this away from her cousin and made that movie instead. And then you get up and go to the bathroom and get some candy, which is what I did.
What’s Good About It: The hairpieces. You can always count on the hairpieces.