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Brokedown Palace

1999, Movie, PG-13, 100 mins

Brokedown Palace: Review

BROKEDOWN PALACE
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Two teenagers from Ohio get into big trouble in Thailand in this handsome but familiar drama. Free-spirited Alice (Claire Danes) and good girl Darlene (Kate Beckinsale), best friends as long as they can remember, are supposed to go on a high school graduation trip to Hawaii. But at the last minute Alice persuades Darlene that Bangkok would be more fun — "it's like Las Vegas with no parents and no rules," she crows, and unworldly Darlene reluctantly agrees. Once there, they meet a charming Australian named Nick (Daniel Lapaine), who turns both their pretty heads and talks them into a quick trip to Hong Kong, his treat. It is, of course, a trick, and a nasty one at that; no sooner have the two little lambs made it to the airport than they're arrested for drug smuggling, their tearful protestations of innocence greatly undermined by the sacks of heroin in Alice's backpack. Next thing you know they're in the kinder, gentler version of that third-world hellhole prison made famous by MIDNIGHT EXPRESS; American-hating inmates abound and there are giant cockroaches in the gruel, but no-one's reduced to biting off anybody's tongue. An expatriate lawyer (Bill Pullman) struggles to get the girls' case reopened, while the strain of incarceration frays their friendship. Danes and Beckinsale are by far the best things about this routine imperiled-innocents-abroad drama. While cliched plot machinations (cover-ups, institutionalized corruption, indifference in high places) unfold around them, they create a convincing portrait of naïve girls tested by adversity of their own heedless making. The ending is a cop out, and the movie's insistence that the whole Thai justice system is brutally stacked seems a little US-centric (there was heroin in the bag), but overall it's a colorful, diverting cautionary tale. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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