Nicolas Cage stars in 'Bangkok Dangerous'

NICOLAS CAGE didn't wind up in Bangkok 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 in an alternative light."

Enter the Pang brothers, the Hong Kong-born action-horror hotshots 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 earlier 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 arrives in multiplexes Friday) as Joe, an assassin of few words who travels to Thailand's capital 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 -- a predicament that may bring to mind for some viewers the oh-so-sage warning in "One Night in Bangkok," Murray Head's hit 1984 electro-pop single: "One night in Bangkok and the tough guys crumble/Can't be too careful with your company."

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