Right on the heels of The Bridge on the River Kwai, we have another Western film set in Thailand, this one set in modern times and based on the apparently real story of a Briton who was sentenced to prison in the country. It appeared on some lists of best films of the year but apart from being well shot, it doesn’t seem all that special to me.

Billy Moore is a young Briton who has moved to Thailand in search of fortune and adventure. He takes up Muay Thai and manages to make a living of sorts but is also a drug addict. Soon enough he is busted by the police and sent to prison. Conditions there are atrocious as expected and he witnesses fights, murders and rapes. Over time he learns how to fit in with the system and possibly his impressive physical size helps him to avoid the worst of the abuses. He gets close to a ladyboy named Fame and decides to join the prison’s Muay Thai team. He continues to occasional relapse into his drug habit but the implication is that it is the discipline from training that eventually helps him to get his life back on track.

This film generally is able to boast high production values and good acting. Joe Cole does a decent job in the leading role and the camera captures all of grittiness and seediness of the underbelly of Thailand. The Muay Thai fights actually feature surprisingly good choreography including one scene that is a single long take. The intent is to make you feel how awful life in a Thai prison is and that part certainly works. You only have to look at them sleeping packed tightly together on dirty bare concrete floors to know that you would never want to end up there and it certainly makes the prisoner of war camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai look like a holiday resort in comparison.

Unfortunately that is pretty much all that this film does. It makes you feel like an outside observer looking at Moore’s life and so fails to create a much of an emotional connection to him. We never learn what his life was like before coming to Thailand and why he came here. Indeed, he appears to spend much of the time in a sort of fugue state whether due to the drugs, his blind rage or intense concentration on boxing. As such he seems to experience the world around him at a remove, as if it is not quite real and he is not quite there especially as everyone else are Thais who chatter in a language that he doesn’t understand. He tries to form some kind of relationship with Fame but that doesn’t go very far and so she is never properly developed as a character. This distance transfers over to the audience so we see what happens but don’t feel much one way or another about what we see. That’s no way to make a film that leaves a lasting impression on the audience.

I think this looks like a reasonably accurate portrayal of what being in a Thai prison might be like. It is nice that while the conditions shown are awful, it doesn’t try to paint the Thai authorities as being malicious. It simply looks as if they’re doing their best with limited resources and the worst crime is simple neglect. With no real surprises in the plot and no real emotional resonance to speak of, I can’t say that this is a very good film at all.