Screenhead

Ah, remakes.  I love you so.

And when I first saw the trailers for the remake of Bangkok Dangerous, featuring no less than Nicholas Cage as hitman Joe, I confess that I had some serious reservations.

Why?  Because that trailer looked about as dull as a burlap sack full of wet hair, that’s why.  And when I watched the movie, I was pleasantly surprised…but not by very much.

Hitman Joe is the best there is—a fact that a whole lot of other fictional hitmen would LOVE to dispute via all manner of lethal hardware—and he’s on his way to his final job, four kills in Bangkok.  He hires a local pickpocket to serve as his go-between between himself and his bosses, but eventually takes a liking to the pickpocket, training him in the art of killing as his student.  Joe’s first three kills go off with varying levels of resistance, but his fourth kill, the Prime Minister of Thailand, isn’t so easy.  The pickpocket Joe trained has made it abundantly clear to Joe that the Prime Minister really IS one of Thailand’s finest, and Joe’s trust in his pickpocket friend / student is getting in the way.  Now, Joe’s on the run, and his pickpocket friend is now in danger from the syndicate that hired Joe in the first place.

When you compare this one to the original, there is almost no comparison at all—every line that comes out of Nicholas Cage’s mouth is a violation of the original canon.  The original hitman Joe, you see, was deaf and mute.  The comparisons only get worse from there.

Frankly, I was somewhat surprised that the movie itself wasn’t as dull as the trailer looked to be, but then, I wasn’t at ALL surprised to find out that the movie itself was only slightly more exciting than the dull-as-dishwater trailer.  Still, I actually found my mind drifting occasionally during this one, a bad sign for an action movie, and a DEADLY bad sign for a remake of an Asian action movie.

When even fiery explosions aren’t sufficient to keep an audience’s attention, you’ve really got to question the value of this movie at all.  And frankly, after watching Nicholas Cage snarl and growl his way coldly through this whole thing, I’m all the more convinced that he needs to stick to suspense / thrillers where he can see what’s coming.  Because when he’s without his precognitive state he just can’t seem to carry a tune, metaphorically.  Seriouly, watching Cage as a hitman who grew a conscience on his last hit left me as cold as the corpse of Lindsay Lohan’s career.  And while I’m at it, can we PLEASE put that whole theme to bed once and for all?  I’m getting sick of hitmen who go through life snarling and growling and just being cold toward everybody until the last twenty minutes or so when they have this epiphany that, son of a bitch, they’re killing ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS!!

It’s like watching a really unpleasant version of Soylent Green, where Charlton Heston’s running around with a Big Bear .50 caliber rifle with a monster scope, screaming “I’ve been shooting at PEOPLE!  At PEEEEEE—PUHHHLLLL!”

And sadly, that image will be the most fun I got out of Bangkok Dangerous.

So thank you, Pang brothers, for executing a truly craptacular remake and wasting my time by making the whole thing only slightly less boring than one of the worst trailers I’ve ever seen.

There has been plenty of untimely deaths so far this year, but last night saw the death of one of Hollywood’s biggest actors, Charlton Heston. He had spent his later years battling with Alzheimer’s Disease.

After enlisting in the US Air Force, Heston started his career on the stage, appearing in Broadway plays as well as getting several TV roles. His transition to cinema came directly through theatre, starring as Marc Antony in the 1950 version of Julius Caesar. He returned to the same role 20 years later when directing Antony and Cleopatra.

Heston is mostly known for playing larger-than-life historical and Biblical figures. The most important role of his early career was as Moses in the Cecil B Demille epic The Ten Commandments. The image of Moses parting the Red Sea will always be associated with Heston’s face. In 1960 Heston starred in another period epic, this time in Ben-Hur, which earned a Best Actor Oscar, as well as numerous others for the film.

Heston was also known for appearing in gritt, noir-ish thrillers. The best of which was Orson Welles’s astounding Touch of Evil. Heston played Vargas, a Mexican police officer on the US border, battling hoods and dirty cops, his idealism getting him and his wife into trouble. It is this role in which I will always remember the actor.

After his Oscar, Heston continued to play historical characters, from El Cid to John the Baptist, to Michaelangelo. But in 1967 Heston started a new phase of his career, and gained a new type of audience. Planet of the Apes became an instant classic, and everyone recognises the “you filthy apes” and “damn you all to hell” snarls of the film (Heston went on to parody them in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of the film). Heston went on to star in The Omega Man (recently remade into I am Legend), and Soylent Green, a film which proposed that the government solved overpopulation by serving people as food.

While Heston’s later career failed to make much of an impact (films like Earthquake are not really remembered now), he did appear in the popular soap Dynasty, as was considered good enough to star in a spin-off series called The Colbys, which ran for almost 50 episodes.

Heston made brief appearence in films during the 90’s, but his career was overshadowed by his political views, which were known to be very conservative (despite being for civil rights long before “it became popular”). He was upset at the notion of Ben Hur being potentially homosexual after writer Gore Vidal revealed it. He was President of the National Rifle Association, a role that caused much negative attention, especially Michael Moore’s popular documentary Bowling for Columbine. The film depits Heston is a negative light, to say the least, as an insensitive man.

Regardless of his dubious political beliefs, Heston will be an actor remembered for his passion and presence on screen, and as the man said himself: “If you need a ceiling painted, a chariot race run, a city besieged, or the Red Sea parted, you think of me.”