Review: Bangkok Adrenaline - Part Two

Okay, so try to follow along with me as I describe the plot so far.

We start with four friends.  One of whom is a world-class martial artist, one of whom is the brains of the group and a high-quality marital artist, one of whom is a mountain of a man portrayed as being dumb as a post and always hungry, and one who I swear is the cause of everything wrong in this world, somehow, and has less character sympathy than your standard Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie.

At least the Nazi might have a family out there somewhere that cares about him.

After falling in debt to a local small time crime boss (a guy who breaks fingers over $90 American money), these four losers decide their best plan of action is to kidnap the daughter of a local millionaire/billionaire/somethingaire.  However, between their own incompetence and the fact that Irene's father (she's the girl in this situation) is apparently a "one man mob boss," things are even worse than before.

Irene's two bodyguards manage to attach a tracking device to the, quote-unquote "good guys" of the film, the extremely skilled martial artist (Dan) and Irene have a brief "meet cute" where angelic voices sing, and we left off after the group's leader (Mike) just learned something from a bondage fan at a leather club about Irene's father, leading Mike to provoke the father into admitting he'd rather have Irene dead than rescued because of...reasons, I guess.

Now, with a hit squad on the way, Irene's bodyguards closing in, and our four male leads having no idea what to do next, you might be thinking "wow, Erik, this sounds like an even dumber version of the Mark Wahlberg/Lou Diamond Phillips/Christina Applegate movie The Big Hit" to which I say "yes, I realized that as well."

So let's jump back in and see if we can't stomach our way through it.

Review: Bangkok Adrenaline - Part One

Every now and again, somebody in Hollywood who has a job that isn't "screenwriter," "producer," or "director" gets the idea, "hey, I work in movies, I could probably make a movie!  How hard could it really be?"  It's because of ideas like this (and the fact that people aren't quick to stop those who have them) that we have movies like Swept Away, a movie so bad that Roger Ebert's review starts with the following sentence:

""Swept Away" is a deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one."

Fortunately, not everybody who has this idea is Guy Pierce.  Many actors have eventually made the successful leap into film production.  Action heroes, dramatic stars, even people who voiced cartoon characters have all moved on to create instead of simply act in a film.  Many of them have been quite successful and quite good.

Then there's Bangkok Adrenaline, a movie I can really only describe as "some really neat scenes of people being kicked in the face mixed in with people who wouldn't be cast as actors in any high school production of anything.  Anywhere."

I've had this movie sitting on the shelf for several years now, waiting for just the right time to watch it.

It turns out there is no right time.

That's right, we're doing a scene by scene synopsis, in the spirit of Dead or Alive, Barb Wire, and Iron Sky.  Because if I had to suffer through watching it, then you have to suffer through reading it.

Let's get started.