The Dangerous (1995)

A Japanese brother and sister duo (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Saemi Nakamura) with some unexplained ninjutsu expertise murder their way through the coke dealing underworld of New Orleans. Because the cops, not even the randomly named Random (Michael Paré), can’t really cope with this sort of thing, the corrupt powers that be manage to draw retired man of violence Davalos (Robert Davi) back in with one of those offers one can’t refuse.

For also unexplained reasons, Davalos isn’t just hot shit when it comes to killing people – as he proves early on in a shoot-out in a graveyard that mainly consists of everyone involved running backwards while shooting – he is also an expert in the made-up version of Japanese culture the film trades in. So teaming him up with Random makes perfect sense, and random doesn’t seem too phased by having to team up with a random (see what I did there?) thug.

On the negative side, Davalos also happens to be an old enemy of New Orleans coke kingpin Tito (Juan Fernández). Tito for his part believes his underlings are being killed by the cops – who always walk around with swords in this parallel universe New Orleans, one assumes – and hires a knife-wielding duo of killers going by Emile (John Savage) and Henri (Jim Youngs) Lautrec. I assume their brother Toulouse is out and about painting somewhere.

Various amateurishly staged action sequences occur.

If all of this sounds like a hot, overcomplicated mess, that is exactly what Rod Hewitt’s and David Winters’s The Dangerous is. A tale of crossed revenges shouldn’t be as complicated as this turns out to be, but Hewitt’s script somehow manages that feat by never explaining the things that need explaining, overexplaining what you never wanted to know, and dipping everything in a fat sauce of badly digested clichés about honour and revenge. Which somehow never leaves time for the film to actually find a way to gracefully go from one scene to the next. More often than not, this feels as if parts of the script where written after scenes had been shot, made to fit any which way.

While this does not lead to a tense, suspenseful action movie, it does provide the film with many opportunities to charm with bizarre moments. So there’s the mandatory one scene Elliott Gould cameo (this time around he’s a junkie slash projectionist and gets his cheeks grabbed by Davi in a truly awkward moment – so at least he’s working for his mortgage, or whatever else Gould needed to pay off at the time); an unhoused informant with a radar sense very useful when he’s stashed in a car trunk; the complete nonsensical “Japanese” “philosophy” generally accompanied by painful attempts of the score to “sound Japanese”; Fernández cackling maniacally and looking rather aroused when he lets the Lautrecs murder one of his underlings as a test; and so on and so forth.

All of this is enjoyable enough when you are of the disposition to find joy in the little things, and I’d even call The Dangerous a minor cheap shot action gem for this, if not for the sad fact that action direction and choreography are absolutely terrible. To add insult to injury, the action is badly edited and amateurishly filmed in a “what’s the worst angle to shoot any given moment from” kind of way, so much so that even old pros at looking interesting in shitty action sequences like most of the cast members are can’t do anything against it. Even worse, the locations – a cinema, that New Orleans graveyard including a jazz funeral, a high rise rooftop and so on – would be perfect for doing something clever and exciting with them. The filmmakers just don’t seem to be able to.

But at least, we will always have the merry ring of absurdities the non-action parts of The Dangerous churn out.