The mean men
break into the house and kill the proprietor of this home and
his wife. There's a little boy in the house as well, and
I don't think this particular mean man was initially going to
kill him, but then the little bugger pulls off his mask so now
the mean man puts his gun up to the boys temple and pulls the
trigger. I guess the mean man shot the boy in the head
at point blank range with one of those .1 caliber bullets
because little Manit is fighting for his life. Well,
mean men can't have this boy surviving and identifying them,
so they try to kill him, but fortunately a kindly nurse is
looking out for the boy and scurries him a way to safety, to a
kung fu master, where the boy will grow up and seek
revenge. In Bangkok. Which is why they called this
movie 'Bangkok Revenge' I think.
The truth of the matter is that adult
Manit, Played by stuntman John Foo, isn't really looking for
any revenge at all. Because of the injuries to his
brain, Manit doesn't feel pain or emotions or nothing.
He just kind of wanders around in a daze doing not much of
anything. At least until that thing happened.
Going back twenty or so years, while at the hospital after the
boy disappeared, one of the bad men gave some random nurse a
business card and told her to call if she should hear anything
about the missing boy. Now back to the present, while
Manit was visiting his adopted dying mother, and she passed
him some documents about his murdered parents and the police
conspiracy behind it… we are not going even get into how in
the hell she acquired these documents… this nurse overheard
the conversation. Twenty years later. She STILL
has this business card in her nurse uniform. How hard
would it have been just to let that go? Now the bad men
know where Manit is and now they can finally finish off this
little boy. Why? I have no clue. I'm
thinking, by now, if he knew anything he would've long ago
gone to the police, but I guess it's always better to be safe
than sorry.
'Sorry'
would be the operative word here. Not to describe this
movie, per se, which is pretty sorry to be honest with you,
but more so to describe how these people are going to feel
after they start messing with Manit. Manit, in a word,
is awesome. He kicks ass with such free reckless abandon
that he, and the actor that plays him in John Foo, are truly
something to see. In a sentence, if you want to know
what I thought about this movie, scenes where John Foo is
kicking ass… awesome. Everything else… horrible.
But back on point, emotionless Manit is now curious why all of
these people, all of the sudden, are trying to kill him.
He gets a little help in this after rescuing a pretty reporter
(Caroline Ducey) who will do some reporting stuff to
help. Not really. Actually what she's going to do
is provide this movie with a touch of gratuitous skin and then
get captured so she can get rescued, and that would be about
it. There is also a tortured, disgraced former French
policeman / Ultimate Fighter… don't ask… who also helps.
Kind of. Who knows? All I do know is that Manit
will get this revenge, that he doesn't care about, while in
Bangkok.
Directed by Jean-Marc Mineo, 'Bangkok Revenge' is a fairly
terrible movie. I said this same thing about another
movie with the word 'Bangkok' in the title a couple of years
back with 'Bangkok Knockout', and while that move was terrible
as well… it ended up being terribly awesome. The
difference? If one has bad actors and bad dialog but
great fighters… then don't have the actors act or talk that
much. Just have them kicking ass. That's a solid
recipe for success for there. 'Bangkok Revenge' on the
other hand has so much dialog, and so many plot points and
turns, and so many actors trying to speak in languages they
clearly aren't comfortable with, that the movie just collapses
under its own weight of general nonsense.
I see the effort to try to mask a few of these things
though. I guess the director felt John Foo wasn't a good
enough actor, even though I've seen him in a couple of things
and he didn't seem all that bad to me, but to hide his
perceived inability, he was given no emotion. That takes
a load off of an actor, now doesn't it? It is a little
odd to hear this alleged 'Thai Native' speaking with a British
accent, but in the end analysis I'd rather hear his British
accent than having to listen to him utter the few Thai words
he had to say, or listen to the two French actors in this film
struggle with English, or hear the rest of the Thai cast
struggle with English. Subtitles work. And
the narrative was about as slipshod as the language problem,
dropping plot points out of the middle of the sky, introducing
all kinds of strangeness such as opera singing drug dealers
and kung fu transvestites and more dirty cops than you can
shake a stick at… with none of these plot points ever coming
together to form any kind of a cohesive story.
But at least John Foo is a helluva athlete and martial
artist. Like I mentioned earlier, when he's doing that
thing he's doing, the movie is tolerable. Even enjoyable
at times. But an emotionless 'Thai' ass kicker with a
British accent can only carry you so far.
Love 'Bangkok Revenge' for John Foo's amazing skills, despise
it for everything else.
