I saw this was available on HBO Max, and with us needing to get more from newly inducted Hall of Famer Mark Dacascos on the site, it seemed like a perfect match. By the same token, every time I see the title, I get the Murray Head song of the same name stuck in my dome. I haven't had it this bad since Mike Nelson sang the chorus while he and the 'bots were riffing on Alien from LA. Anyway, in addition to us, our friend Cam Sully reviewed this at Action Elite, Matt Spector covered it on Bulletproof Action, and it was done on Roger Ebert's site, so you can go to those places to see what they thought.
One Night in Bangkok is a remake of Collateral, with Dacascos as Kai, a Hawaiian hit man out for revenge. He gets picked up by a ride share driver, and tells her he'll give her six grand if she drives him around for the evening. With a sick brother, this sounds like a great deal for her, until each stop leaves Dacascos more bruised and bloody, making her wonder what he's up to and if this is a good idea. The thing is though, once you let Dacascos in, it's hard to quit him--we've all learned that over time.
Where do I go with this one? It's more of a slow burner, which isn't always a bad thing. Also, I was a fan of Dacascos taking on a role that was more than just mean-mugging and beating people up--though I love seeing him do that too. He takes the scene I took a screen of above, where he's just sitting outside the airport waiting for his ride, and makes it something I want to watch, which is not always easy to do. On the other hand, the runtime was a bit long; the director, Kaos, used a split screen effect at times that I felt was distracting and gimmicky; and the dialog left a little to be desired, which, when you're working on a slow-burner, it needs to be better since it's propping up the film more. In fact, there was a lot of non-speaking chemistry between Dacascos and the driver, played by Vanida Golten, and I felt like some of the scenes of them in the car together could have been better without dialog, especially with the great shots of Bangkok at night mixed in. Overall though, I liked this different take on Collateral, and the attempt to go outside the usual tone and style of an action movie, especially with how Dacascos took this part and really went for it.
This is not the first time Dacascos has played a more emotionally complex hit man, and one fun similarity that this film has to Crying Freeman, is Dacascos's wife, Julie Condra, whom he met on the set of that earlier movie, is in this as well--I won't give it away, but just mention she's in this and leave it at that. Again, I can't give away too much of what the movie's about in order to keep it fresh for you if you do decide to see it, which hampers my ability to go too far into why I liked Dacascos's performance, but the coolest part for me is that he's playing someone ten years older than him. We're so used to these aging action stars playing someone younger--Van Damme's character wasn't born in 1960, he was born in 1970; or Seagal playing a 60-year-old active duty soldier--for Dacascos to say "no, make me ten years older; make me a grandfather; don't give me the love scenes with the younger actress," to me is not only refreshing, but shows who he is as a professional. And the dialog issues I mentioned aside, I think he hits this out of the park, which makes it all the better.
This is the second Kaos-directed film we've done here at the DTVC, the other being Zero Tolerance with Adkins and Daniels. This one works better, but it has a similar narrative to the other film, so perhaps Kaos has a thing for fathers going on killing sprees for their daughters kinds of story lines. For me, what made this more, was how he made Bangkok a character in the way a Scorsese makes New York City a character. We're so used to Western directors making films in Asia and projecting this "mystery of the Orient" tone that's steeped in Western Imperialism--and to some extent, this is done in a lot of DTV films because the movies are made on the cheap and the studios want every cliche checked off to keep us Western audiences happy. In a way, even the title is a play on that tradition, because nothing typifies that more than the song that the film shares its name with. This is not to say we need to "cancel" all the DTV flicks shot in Asia that traffic in these stereotypes, rather, it's just another thing for us to recognize along with the boom mics and other gaffs we catch as we're watching them.
Kane Kosugi has a really small part in this, despite his name being on the cover. The thing is though, he was a really cool character, so it's kind of too bad he wasn't in it more. I think the issue is, as I watched the movie, I don't know how would Kaos have fit him in. One thing I noticed, is in the IMDb synopsis, and the Roger Ebert site review, Kosugi is incorrectly listed as the cop chasing Dacascos down--and the Ebert reviewer actually calls him "Shane Kosugi," so I wanted to clear that up for anyone who gets confused when they watch this. Another performance I liked in this was Prinya Intachai, who is actually the one who plays the cop chasing Dacascos. He brought a New York sensibility to the proceedings that I thought added a lot of flavor in away that hearkened back to an old hard-boiled NYC detective tradition.
Finally, one thing I liked about Dacascos's character was, not only was he Hawaiian, but it was brought up in the film specifically that he was Hawaiian. It's one thing for a movie or TV show that takes place in Hawaii to have Dacascos playing a Hawaiian, but here he was representing Hawaii in Thailand, which I know as a proud Hawaiian he must've appreciated. I also think it helped Kaos in his attempt to divorce this film from the constraints of Western Imperialism, as we're used to seeing the American or European go into Asia and beat up and/or kill a bunch of local baddies and save the girl. By having Dacascos say he's "Hawaiian", he's no longer the ugly American or representing the idea of American exceptionalism against Asia that he would've been if he'd said he was "American."
All right, it's time to wrap this up. This is still available on HBO Max, and if you have it, I think it's worth checking out. It is a little long, the dialog is a little off, and I could have done without the split screen effect; but overall I liked what Kaos was going for here, and I liked how Dacascos took a part that stretched him as an actor and hit it out of the park.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12192190
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