WhatzUp

Brokedown Palace
by Derek Neff

While vacationing on the cheap in Thailand, best friends Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) and Alice (Claire Danes) are arrested for smuggling heroine they don't even know they are carrying, and without much fanfare they are duly sentenced to prison for decades. Instead of focusing on what life is like behind the walls of a Thai prison, screenwriter David Arata and director Jonathan Kaplan are more interested in the legal wranglings involved in trying to get the girls out. (Bill Pullman plays the money-hungry prison-rights lawyer who half-heartedly tries, at least at first, to get them out on appeal; Lou Diamond Phillips plays the girls' indifferent liaison at the American embassy.) As the movie progresses, one realizes there is room for the possibility that one of the girls did in fact know they were smuggling heroine, and this gives the movie a much-needed jolt at about the halfway point.

Although Brokedown Palace doesn't really rise to the standards of the movie it begs comparison to, Midnight Express - it's not even as good as more recent Americans-imprisoned-in-foreign-country movies like Red Corner or Return to Paradise - it does boast a solid, well-developed screenplay, and it keeps one watching and wondering about the fate of its two young heroines to the movie's final, unexpectedly touching, moments.