Hot on the heels of the exemplary Diablo, Scott Adkins, the hardest-working man in DTV action, is back with Prisoner of War. It’s a “big” film, as far as these things go, possessed of a certain ambition that pushes up against the limits of the genre. Part The Great Escape, part tournament-style fighting movie, Prisoner of War finds Adkins playing RAF Wing Commander James Wright, a pilot who is shot down over the Bataan Peninsula and finds himself in a Japanese POW camp in the days and weeks leading up to the Bataan Death March. Parachuting out of his damaged plane, Wright lands in dense jungle and is almost immediately set upon by enemy soldiers. He fights them off, in the first of many, many elaborately choreographed action sequences, but is eventually overwhelmed via sheer numbers.
He’s dragged to a nearby internment camp, where he is presented to Lt. Col. Benjiro Ito (Peter Shinkoda), a brutal man who rules over the captured soldiers with an iron fist. Ito values skill but is also a sadist, and so finds it amusing to pit Wright against his most skilled fighter rather than to execute him outright. But Ito is shocked when Wright handily wins the bout, and intrigued by Wright’s deployment of a mysterious, “forbidden” finishing move. And so begins a long series of increasingly brutal encounters, as Ito pits Adkins’ skilled martial artist against waves of opponents in an attempt to test his limits and break him. Along the way, Wright becomes pals with his fellow prisoners, a variety of clichéd types of all nationalities, each of whom dreads the upcoming march that Ito promises will be “worse than Hell.” A series of escape scenarios are presented, and in-between fights, Wright and the men do recon in an attempt to find a weakness in the camp’s perimeter.
It’s all pretty straightforward stuff, chock full of the requisite amount of combat, ably choreographed by long-time stunt performer Alvin Hsing and nicely photographed by actor-turned director Louis Mandylor. Adkins and Mandylor have starred in a number of films together — most notably the Debt Collector series — and Mandylor has clearly learned some tricks of the trade by established DTV auteurs like Jesse V. Johnson and William Kaufman. There’s a kind of comfortable camaraderie that comes across in the performances, as well as the simple but fluid way they have constructed and filmed the fights. Like the best combat films, Mandylor doesn’t overcut or rely too heavily on slow motion, instead allowing movements to play out in real time and only editing to emphasize impacts. It seems simple, and yet so many movies get it wrong. As critic Sean Gilman has noted, “what fans of straight-to-video action films crave most is artistic verisimilitude: performers who do crazy action stunts and really look like they’re putting their bodies in danger for the sake of the audience.” (To wit, Adkins suffered a pulled hamstring early during filming and had to complete the film while powering through the injury.)
As far as entertainment goes, the action more than gets the job done. But the film also gets weirder as it goes along, even approaching the strange, psychosexual undercurrents of Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Ito seems obsessed with Wright, constantly manufacturing reasons to not simply kill him and be done with it. The camera loves Adkins’ physique, and a certain homoerotic tension begins to bubble under the surface of this otherwise standard (if satisfying) action movie. In the fog of war, bloodlust and desire seem to intermingle, suggesting impulses that these men might otherwise seek to deny or dismiss. Call it the erotic underpinnings of fascism. Of course, there’s virtually no chance the filmmakers intended any of this reading, but the subtext fascinates. Regardless of how one chooses to read it, Prisoner of War delivers what it says on the tin.
DIRECTOR: Louis Mandylor; CAST: Scott Adkins, Peter Shinkoda, Michael Copon; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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