HOLLYWOOD — Nicolas Cage didn't wind up in Bangkok by accident. As the Oscar-winning actor explains it, there were reasons both personal and professional that compelled him to change gears after the mega-dollar success of the family-friendly action-adventure "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" and travel across the globe in pursuit of a new career iteration. Not least was the impulse to shake up his image by appearing in a foreign-made film.

"On my path of film acting, I've been trying to think more and more internationally, trying to have a global mind," Cage said. "That means going to foreign countries and working with filmmakers who have a special point of view that will reinvent me in an alternative light."

Enter the Pang brothers, the Hong Kong-born action-horror hotshots responsible for the 2003 Chinese movie hit "The Eye." A franchise-spawning horror movie about a woman whose corneal transplant causes her to see dead people, it was remade as a Jessica Alba vehicle earlier this year.

Executives at the production company Blue Star Pictures had been courting the writer-director siblings Danny and Oxide Pang to remake their 1999 Thai-language hit, "Bangkok Dangerous," for an American audience. And that's how Cage came to sign on to star in the ultra-violent action thriller (which opened last week) as Joe, an assassin of few words who travels to Thailand's capital to carry out a series of contract killings.

The character falls under Bangkok's exotic thrall, drawn into a tentative romance with a comely deaf-mute pharmacy assistant. And he begins to question his isolated existence just as the mobsters who ordered his services decide to put Joe in the crosshairs.

Reached by phone in Thailand, where the Pang brothers are based, Oxide Pang said he felt "fortunate" to have American backers interested in retooling his films for Western viewers — even if he feels the final product bears only a passing resemblance to the 1999 original.

"In eight years, we had two movies remade by Hollywood!" exclaimed Pang. "So many directors make a lot of films and don't have any chance to remake a movie in Hollywood. On that, we feel good."

"But the original ... 'Bangkok Dangerous' is old already," he added. "We feel like this is a new story. It's not a remake."

Shot on location with a Thai crew, "Bangkok Dangerous" delivers a strong sense of place — gunbattles are intercut with shots of floating lotus blooms, and Thailand's national symbol, the elephant, provides a leitmotif. But the filmmakers hope the movie will stand out to moviegoers by offering a kind of cultural immersion in an alternative filmic universe.

"It is an Asian movie, not an American one," said Cage, who also produced the film. "We didn't want to make any concessions to the American audience, and let the Pangs do anything they could to break from the American moviemaking formula."