10 Awful Movie Remakes With Silver Linings You Can't Ignore

4. Bangkok Dangerous

The Movie: In 1999 Danny and Oxide Pang made their directorial debut, the violent yet elegant action thriller about a deaf and mute assassin. Clearly owing a debt to the likes of John Woo, Bangkok Dangerous was a remarkably assured debut with a great deal of style even if it lacked somewhat in substance. Returning to the subject matter nearly ten years later and remaking it with Nicolas Cage in the central role, you have to wonder what the point was (beyond, presumably, receiving a hefty sum from Cage's production company Saturn Films for their efforts). No longer deaf and mute, Cage takes on the central role as the hitman and delivers one of the most wooden performances of his career - which is saying something, given his woefully bad string of duds in recent years. The Silver Lining: The Pang brothers at least manage to deliver the goods when it comes to the action scenes, with a particularly well-staged chase and shoot-out conducted on the heavily populated canals of Thailand. Here the debt to John Woo becomes most apparent, with Cage's haircut strongly resembling Jean-Claude Van Damme's in Hard Target and the motorbike antics familiar to anyone who's seen Hard Boiled. Inferior, yes, but a welcome intermission in an otherwise incredibly tedious, schematic remake.