Bangkok, Oriental city, and the city don’t know what the city is getting: Nicolas Cage with a lifetime supply of the inkiest shades of Just for Men.

In the ridiculous action failure Bangkok Dangerous, the Pang Brothers (The Eye, The Messengers) remake their own supposedly popular 1999 Thai hit of the same name, but to no great effect. So unimaginative, so uninvolving is this routine no-effort that it took me several months of starts and stops just to get through it, and even then, I gave up with about 20 minutes left to go.

Cage is Joe, one of those expert hit men of the movies: He doesn’t miss, but he’s getting too old for this shit. Instead of killing strangers on a freelance basis, he wants to meet someone and settle down. While on assignment in Bangkok, Joe meets Fon (Charlie Yeung, New Police Story), a nice deaf girl who works at the local pharmacy. He teaches her skills she needs to know, like hand-to-hand combat and watermelon shooting; in turn, she teaches him skills he needs to know, like how to feed bananas to an elephant and how to upstage an Academy Award winner without saying a word.

The only reason to watch a film like Bangkok Dangerous in the first place is obvious: potential for cool action sequences. The Pang (Pain?) Brothers deliver a decent boat chase and murder by motorcycle, but no scene is pulled off with a discernible degree of pizazz. It may be the least engaging action vehicle for an A-list actor this decade. If only the sibs had borrowed elements of one of Cage’s other turds of the time, The Wicker Man, they might have something.

I’d suggest the bee helmet. —Rod Lott

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I’d like to think The Black Cobra 2 is the only Fred Williamson movie in which he wears a Members Only jacket and with a preponderance of cowbell on the soundtrack, but since there’s a number in the title, I can’t be too sure.

Fred stars as Malone, a Chicago cop who gets in trouble for exploding a bad guy’s helmet-clad head like a watermelon with a single bullet, just following perhaps the longest opening credits known to man (eight minutes!). So his cantankerous, overweight police chief sends Fred to Manila to hook up with Interpol office Nicholas Hammond (several hills below The Sound of Music and, for that matter, his Spider-Man TV series). To the filmmakers’ credit, it accurately captures enough of the Philippines’ local flavor to make you never ever want to go there.

The Italian-backed actioner almost seems like two movies for the pain of one. In the first part, Fred falls for a buck-toothed, barfy faced girl whose con-man father was found murdered (“I hate to be the barrier of bad news,” Fred says; couldn’t they have dubbed that over?) and then rescues her after she’s kidnapped by slimy terrorists looking for $10,000.

Then she’s out of the picture and part two begins, with said slimy terrorists holding 350 schoolchildren hostage. Since one of them is Hammond’s short-pantsed son, Nick and Fred rub black greasepaint on their faces (well, okay, just Nick) and get all Die Hard-y as only a film like Black Cobra 2 can’t. I’d like to think they don’t show a single one of the 350 kids because of budgetary reasons, but since they didn’t bother to overdub Fred’s gaffe earlier, I can’t be too sure. —Rod Lott

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Writer/producer Roger Corman’s original The Fast and the Furious should be called The Relaxed and the Rear-Projected. In pure old-school AIP fashion, it’s quick, painless and efficient. And a better movie than the loose Vin Diesel remake from 2001.

Also pulling double duty as director, John Ireland stars as a man wanted for murder, and is given the cold-blooded killer name of Frank Webster. While on the run to Mexico, he stops at a diner and is accosted by a porky cop, so he grabs the nearest hostage he can — dish o’ ice cream Dorothy Malone — and they hightail it in her Jaguar.

She’s headed for the “international” car races, so he thinks that’d be a good place to lay low until they can get across the border. Perhaps — just perhaps — captor and captive will fall in love before 75 minutes is up.

For a delinquent type, Ireland sure does look to be in his 40s. The race sequences are antiquated, of course, but that’s what lends this drive-in movie its charm. It’s hard not to have a good time when it flies by so quickly. Bonus: No Paul Walker saying “bro.” —Rod Lott

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Freelance thief Tommy Lee Jones is hired to steal some accounting reports from a corporation. Lucky for him, they’re marked “ACCOUNTING REPORTS” in big, block letters. Unlucky for him, he triggers the alarm during this assignment and is forced to hide the cassette in the back of the Black Moon — an experimental super-car that runs on water and hits 325 mph — during a chance meeting at a gas station.

He tracks the Black Moon to a hotel, where, unlucky for him, professional car thief Linda Hamilton steals it for boss Robert Vaughn’s chop shop, hidden in the basement of a twin high rise. Lucky for him, Hamilton’s having some issues with her boss, so she agrees to help him steal it. Unlucky for him, she also beds down with him — seriously, she kind of looks like a dude.

The fun of Black Moon Rising is all contained in the final third, with the nighttime break-in of the tower, the theft and the escape, all with cranky-puss Tommy Lee climbing through air shafts and doing donuts.

Any movie set in a high-rise at night automatically carries a cachet of cool (unless it stars Paul Reiser), but imagine how much cooler this would have been if screenwriter John Carpenter had directed it as well. This was an early Carpenter script dusted off after he hit it big, so his involvement is limited. But it’s a fairly well-crafted B-picture that knows every so often, you just gotta focus on the car. —Rod Lott

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If Dobermans can be taught to rob a bank, why not blind guys? That’s the premise behind Blind Rage, an oddball crime film that assembles a multicultural quintet who can’t see for shit, to pull off a money heist to end all money heists. Because they’re blind, yes, but also two of the men have names that are synonyms for penises, Wang and Willie. I don’t think history has seen such a thing.

As with that series of bank-robbing doggie movies, this film’s best scenes are the training sequences: “Let’s begin by synchronizing your Braille watches.” Heck, there’s even to-scale model created out of the barest of wood framing so the guys can soak up the sound of each other’s footsteps, the placement of the deposit-slip table, and whatnot. They’re even taught target practice: “Any foreign sound you hear, shoot.” Solid advice; that’s how kids get killed, you know.

And what would this movie be without a little kung fu fighting when it comes time to doing the crime? Probably just as incredibly average, running a few less minutes.

Who are director Efren C. Piñon and writer Leo Fong kidding? This should all but be credited as a remake of The Doberman Gang franchise, because instead of exploiting animals, they’ve just exploited the handicapped. They’ve also exploited a top-billed Fred Williamson, who shows up only at the tail end as his Jesse Crowder character (“one mean cat!”) from Death Journey and No Way Back. The fucking IHOP gets almost as much screen time. —Rod Lott

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