HOLLYWOOD — HOLLYWOOD - Nicolas Cage didn't wind up in Bangkok, Thailand, by accident. As the Oscar-winning actor explains it, there were reasons both personal and professional that compelled him to change gears after the mega-dollar success of the family-friendly action-adventure National Treasure: Book of Secrets and travel across the globe in pursuit of a new career iteration. Not least was the impulse to shake up his image by appearing in a foreign-made film.
"On my path of film acting, I've been trying to think more and more internationally, trying to have a global mind," Cage said. "That means going to foreign countries and working with filmmakers who have a special point of view that will reinvent me."
Enter the Pang brothers, the Hong Kong-born action-horror hot shots responsible for the 2003 Chinese movie hit The Eye. A franchise-spawning horror movie about a woman whose corneal transplant causes her to see dead people, it was remade as a Jessica Alba vehicle this year. Executives at the production company Blue Star Pictures had been courting the writer-director siblings Danny and Oxide Pang to remake their 1999 Thai-language hit, Bangkok Dangerous, for an American audience. And that's how Cage came to sign on to star in the ultra-violent action thriller (which is being distributed by Lionsgate and was last weekend's top movie at the box office) as Joe, an assassin of few words who travels to the capital city to carry out a series of contract killings. The character falls under Bangkok's exotic thrall, drawn into a tentative romance with a comely deaf-mute pharmacy assistant. And he begins to question his isolated existence just as the mobsters who ordered his services decide to put Joe in the crosshairs.
