Bangkok Love Story

Review By Camryn Hansen

The truth that TLA Releasing doesn’t want you to know is that Bangkok Love Story, billed as one of its “hottest films of the summer” with a sexy trailer full of tousled hair, brooding looks, and motorcycles, is actually a complete mess from beginning to end

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This film has no idea what it wants, where it’s headed, who its characters are or why they are doing what they are doing.  I mean this not in any metaphysical sense of Why Am I Here?, etc., but literally.  The story goes that a bunch of Thai guys with guns are out to get the two main characters, Cloud and Stone, whose names appear to be allegorical.  (Don’t be fooled.)  We don’t know who these guys with guns are, what business they’re in, or why Cloud, who was working for them as a hitman, suddenly decides to stop being a hitman when they ask him to take out Stone, who is married to Sand, a broken-down version of himself.  After a gun battle in a sea of golden Buddhas, Cloud and Stone go to an abandoned but homey rooftop warehouse space together on Cloud’s motorcycle, and Stone nurses Cloud, who’s sustained a gunshot wound to the shoulder, back to health, with the help of a bottle of whiskey.  Then, they have steamy sex, after which Cloud pulls a gun on Stone and tells him to get lost.  Stone, smitten with Cloud in a new and wonderful way, reluctantly leaves amidst professions of love, but comes back secretly and spies on Cloud through his warehouse windows.  It’s a struggle, but the two of them eventually get together again, and have splashy sex in the industrial chemical puddles on the roof of the warehouse.

Meanwhile, Cloud’s lower-lying brother Fog is dying from AIDS, which he contracted from his skeevy stepfather; their mother has it too.  There are a number of suggestive shots which reference this, such as Cloud burning photographs with his lighter, Cloud knocking jars of fish onto the ground and staring at his reflection in the broken glass, Cloud staring at an overcast sky, and Cloud riding his motorcycle under an overcast sky.  Eventually, Sand, sitting in the passenger seat of the mini Cooper that her husband drives to meet and make out with Cloud at his house, sees her husband with Cloud and takes a gun out and shoots it into the darkness.  Tragically, her bullet misses whatever mark it may have had to hit Cloud and Fog’s mother only a few moments after they have saved her from suicide by hanging. 

I can’t go on; it’s just too awful. 

Please, only see this movie if you are required to do so for academic credit, with no alternatives.  Even then, I would protest.