Brokedown Palace (1999)

Brokedown Palace (1999): Dir: Jonathon Kaplan / Cast: Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale, Bill Pullman, Lou Diamond Phillips, Daniel Lapaine: Similar to Midnight Express and Return to Paradise only reduced tremendously due to its teenage delivery. Title refers to the destruction of fantasy to a dark reality. Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale are vacationing when a stranger invites them to Hong Kong where they are arrested for possession of drugs. Both girls suffer horribly and make a failed escape attempt. Danes sent an audio recording to a lawyer with her story. Setup is familiar and the prison scenes are standard with a conclusion of self sacrifice. Director Jonathan Kaplan does his best but this is not done on the same level he used on The Accused. The big issue is its familiarity and structure. It plays like a feminine Midnight Express with prison scenes in full overload of clichés. Their vacation is familiar, their time in prison is everything we expect, then Danes gives a halfhearted revelation that plays like a crowd pleaser as oppose to conviction. Bill Pullman as the lawyer is the best performance as he attempts to help these girls. Lou Diamond Phillips appears in a flat role. Daniel Lapaine plays the loser whom the girls hook up with thus leading to the trouble they land in. Theme of sacrifice is sidelined by its lame teen appeal that works against it thus bringing the palace down. Score: 2 ½ / 10

Americans Alice and Darlene decide to take a trip to Bangkok to celebrate their high-school graduation, they are naïve when befriended by a charming Australian who convinces them to join him for a weekend trip to Hong Kong. At the airport they are busted, unjustly arrested, convicted and sent to prison for 33 years for smuggling heroin in Thailand.This movie, as well as being disturbing was visually stunning and also comes with a great soundtrack. Claire Danes is awesome, giving a near perfect performance in her role as the more headstrong of the two girls, (damn can she act) and the ending is absolutely haunting, I'm still thinking about it now days later. 07.13

I had heard about this movie but had never seen it until this week when I found it on Netflix streaming movies. I didn't think that much of Claire Danes back in the 1999 time frame, but she was so good as Temple Grandin in the movie of the same name, I approached this one with a fresh perspective. She really is a good actress and already was when this was filmed in 1998, when she was still a teenager.The story immediately reminded me of an actual jury trial I was involved with in the 1990s, as jury foreman. In a very similar real-life case two teenage girls were caught at the airport with suitcases containing drugs, and they claimed a mysterious man had bought their tickets and asked them to each carry a suitcase onto the plane for him. The man never was found.Claire Danes is Alice and her best friend is Kate Beckinsale (actually 25) Darlene. They had known each other since they were babies crawling towards each other in adjacent yards, and now they have just finished high school together. They are supposed to be going to Hawaii for a week, but on a whim Alice convinces Kate to go to Thailand instead. Their parents don't know.This is a familiar theme in movies, the more recent "Taken" with Liam Neeson also plays on the theme of young daughters not telling the truth about their plans for travel abroad.Naive, the girls meet an Australian man who invites them to Hong Kong for a couple of days, they go, and on the way back to Thailand are caught at the airport with a few kilos of drugs in the carry-on bags. They are put in jail, they get sentenced to 33 years. It looks bleak.One of them gets a tape recording of her story to Bill Pullman as American lawyer Hank Greene, married to a Thai woman, also a lawyer. Pullman plays almost the same character as Daryl Zero in "The Zero Effect", a 1998 movie. But here his motivation is simply the fee, and he gets the girls to have their parents send him $15,000. Not all goes well, when he thinks he has a deal to free the girls, it backfires and they appear doomed. It is a heartbreaking story, but very realistic as this sort of think can happen, and probably does more often than we realize. It took me 15 years but I am glad I finally saw it.SPOILERS: When Hank Greene finally unraveled the whole story, it is one of corruption. The Australian was a known drug smuggler, and on that particular flight had 8 young women carrying drugs for him. As his "fee" he reported Alice and Darlene, so the cops could find their drugs and arrest them, as a diversion of sorts to assure the other 6 went through. The cops knew about this, and being able to arrest the two girls was their compensation for looking the other way. In the end Greene was not able to get the girls off, but Alice did the right thing in her own eyes, she pleaded to the judge that it was all her idea, Darlene was completely innocent, she should go home and Alice would serve a term for both of them. And that is how the movie ends, with Darlene being freed and Alice as a convict perhaps for the rest of her life.

Anyone who has seen the National Geographic Channel series "Locked Up Abroad" will understand how believable this story is. However, it would have been better had it been based on a real-life arrest.The only part that fails to impress and satisfy is the facile, somewhat saccharine ending. (Another element that rang untrue for me was the girls' age. How many parents would send a couple of graduating high-school seniors to Hawaii on their own?)The performances here are uniformly excellent and the settings appear highly realistic.I loved the musical score, and the friendship between Claire Danes and Kate Bettinsale was entirely credible. The always-excellent Bill Pullman shines as a lawyer who toils on low-glamor cases in Thailand but hasn't abandoned his ideals. It is perhaps a strength of this film that the nature and responsibility for the crime remained somewhat ambiguous.This should be viewed by every young person traveling to an exotic locale. When it comes to one's bags, one can never be too careful!