One day someone will make a film about a lone-wolf killer who gets offered One Last Job, turns it down, retires rich and lives happily ever after. For now, we must endure films such as Bangkok Dangerous, a Hollywood remake of the Pang brothers’ cult hit (directed by the Pang brothers themselves) that gives new meaning to the word cynical.

Nic Cage, who co-produced this one, plays Joe, the troubled, heroin-addicted assassin who finds more than he bargained for in Thailand. Having hired a street punk called Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm) as a “disposable” assistant, he finds himself becoming the latter’s teacher (“Why didn’t I kill him?” drawls Joe, “it’s strange, when I looked in his eyes I saw myself”). As part of this new introspective mood, he falls in love with a deaf-mute shop assistant, Fon (Charlie Young), and asks her out on a date.

The pair laugh, they hold hands, they wish upon a star (via Buddha), but then she discovers his bloody day job and Joe’s stricken expression returns.

He starts having trouble with his gangster employers, who decide he may be a liability after all. They assume they can bump him off with ease (“He’s only one man!”). They assume wrong.

Joe seems to have superhuman strength and reflexes — his hair, too, makes you look twice. It seems Cage wants the world to believe he still has long, flowing locks; if so, his big mistake was to graft bits of an old shag-pile carpet onto his head. Because that’s what his “hair” looks like. Cage wields huge guns; Cage whizzes around on a motorbike; Cage looks — at least a 100 times — at his spiffy watch. The gadgets are flawless. Those raddled black fibres spouting from his scalp, though, expose what modern technology has yet to perfect.

Cage is a natural comedian. Yet this film is devoid of (intentional) laughs. The original was pretty po-faced but, with its deaf-mute hero and lack of voiceover, contained a certain poetic mystery. Here, the more Joe realises the error of his ways, the more risible the film becomes. His mission is to protect Fon from the bad guys, the kind of men who kidnap country girls and force them into prostitution. (We get to see these poor girls lying around topless to help us grasp how exploited they are.)

The Hong Kong brothers have been welcomed in Hollywood and are obviously profiting from the relationship. How depressing, though, that they’ve made a film in which a homicidal, pedagogical white man comes along and saves Thailand from ruin. At the start of the film, Kong gets his kicks by swearing at Joe in Thai. By the end, he’s calling him “Boss”. East meets West, then, but not exactly halfway.