“Bangkok Dangerous” is a competent but uninspired action thriller that showcases an exotic locale and provides an opportunity for Nicolas Cage to display his less-is-more approach to acting.

This isn’t a dig at the self-contained actor. Like some of his colleagues, he’s got that off-the-wall thing going on that even makes bad movies kind of interesting. Think of a younger Dennis Hopper, Mickey Rourke at any age, Steve Buscemi, the late great Warren Oates and of course the king of them all — Marlon Brando.

Cage plays Joe, a professional assassin who travels the globe eliminating the competition for his bosses and living a lonely-guy life. This we learn from Cage’s droning  narration. In the process, he outlines a brief set of rules that keeps him at the top of his profession: don’t ask questions; don’t get involved with anybody outside the job; eliminate any connections to himself; and get out at the right time.

Joe decides to take one last job and then retire to some unannounced hit-man heaven. His destination is Bangkok, Thailand, and he’s assigned to take out four targets.

Generally, he needs an expendable accomplice and go-between and he finds his willing errand boy in the person of Kong, a street scammer and petty thief.

Shahkrit Yamnarm makes Kong a likable scalawag and Joe breaks one of his rules by taking him on as an apprentice. He breaks this same rule when he becomes smitten by a lovely, deaf pharmacist and he begins to court her like a geeky school boy. She’s played by the glowing and charismatic Charlie Young.

Why Joe is able to grow a heart at this late stage of his career remains a mystery. Is sentimentality a symptom of mid-life crisis among professional killers? While normal men buy sports cars and propose to strippers, do murderers feel compelled to mentor younger guys and woo nice girls?

At any rate, we know from dozens of other movies like this that when you break your own code you buy yourself a humongous load of trouble.

Hong Kong twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang are the directors here and they demonstrate a crisp visual style and a knack for film noir atmosphere. This is a remake of their Thai-language thriller of the same title and they must have loved that movie so much they decided to do it all over again. It’s too bad that they didn’t push its pulp elements further.

This is an R-rated movie and it features some nudity, which brings up one of the filmmakers’ weirder decisions.

Some of the action takes place in a night club where beautiful women dance on stage  and then work the audience as bar girls. Their costumes could pass muster in a convent school. And this is supposed to be Bangkok, one of the hot spots for sex tourism?  

That’s a minor point but it’s indicative of the opportunity the Pang brothers miss in not plumbing the seedy depths of a story custom-made for mega-seediness. They seem to be cleaning up the crime scene in order to enhance the emerging nobility that their reprobate hero is beginning to manifest. It has the same logic as Madonna deciding to write children’s books.

Still, the twins demonstrate an unquestionable storytelling ability and a sense of visual style. This outing is a tad better than OK but it would be interesting to see them in a full-throttle mode.