August 24, 1999
Web posted at: 12:12 p.m. EDT (1612 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Hollywood just can't seem to let an overripe idea fall from its genre vine, so now they're handing us our umpteenth helping of God-fearing Americans getting locked away in exotic prisons with no hope of release. This time they're calling the movie "Brokedown Palace," because if you don't think up a new title you get sued.

It stars Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale as Alice and Darlene, a couple of rather dumb kids from Ohio who are incorrectly arrested as heroin smugglers during a high school graduation trip to mean old Thailand.

Screenwriter David Arata and director Jonathan Kaplan don't miss a beat with this baby. The girls receive the requisite 33-year sentence after being searched at the airport by sweaty guards who find the incriminating evidence. Then they get bashed in the extremities with the wooden club and are forced to eat the food full of crawly bugs in the pitch-dark prison with one shaft of light shining down at the end of the corridor.

Then the hopeful relative shows up, but he can't get anything done because of the country's corrupt judicial system. Then a crusading lawyer (Bill Pullman as "Yankee" Hank Green) fights to get the girls released. I'm tellin' ya, it's all so tense you'll eventually go get some popcorn.

"Midnight Express" (1978) is the "Citizen Kane" of this kind of thing, having set the precedent for just how dank and inhumane the situation has to be before it qualifies as hellish.

But "Midnight Express," for all its unjustifiable racism and sensuously lit violence, was a sharply crafted film. Its opening sequence -- during which Brad Davis falls into an incarceration sweat as the Turkish police find numerous packs of hashish taped to his body -- sticks with you like a psychic gummi bear. It's downright scary, with Giorgio Moroder's insistent electronic score sounding like Davis' heartbeat has been fed through a MOOG synthesizer.

"Brokedown Palace," on the other hand, just marches out the clichés and expects us to get rattled because we once saw "Midnight Express."

I've written this before because I've basically covered this movie before (see "Red Corner" and "Return to Paradise"), but the overriding message of these films is that every person who lives in a country other than the United States is mean, corrupt, vengeful, and -- most of all -- dirty. Thailand's justice system as portrayed in "Brokedown Palace" is a no-win situation, but Danes and Beckinsale face so many cockroaches you'd think they were being held prisoner by truncheon-wielding Orkin men.

Beckinsale even loses her sense of balance at one point when a roach dies in her ear canal and causes an infection. There are no Q-Tips in Thai prisons.

Danes' Alice is supposed to be the mouthy, tough cookie of the two friends. Beckinsale, as Darlene, is the daddy's girl, and Alice makes snide remarks about it once in a while. But both of them seem fresh off the turnip truck, prancing around the streets of Thailand like they're at Disney World.

It's hard to tell how you're supposed to feel about it, but it's pretty distasteful to see the two rolling their eyes and giggling as they kneel down and pretend to pray in a crowded mosque. They might have cute dimples and bare midriffs, but the two characters are almost wholly unlikable Midwestern brats.

There's a weak attempt to make the audience think that one of the girls might have tried to smuggle the heroin on her own, but the real culprit is painfully obvious right from the start. Daniel Lapaine plays a mysterious Australian loverboy who Beckinsale sleeps with at one point, and he initiates the trip to the airport where -- whoops -- all that heroin turns up in Alice's knapsack. It sure didn't seem like the giggled-at worshippers at the mosque set them up, although it would have been fitting.

Surprisingly, outside of the one instance of clubbing, the girls don't seem to be in all that much physical peril while they're locked up. They spend most of their time simply hanging out and talking.

Their meetings with Pullman, though supposedly of life-or-death importance, don't seem any more strained than the scenes where they're washing their metal dinnerware. And Pullman's scenes with an uncaring bureaucrat played by Lou Diamond Phillips display just as little urgency.

Overall, it feels more like the girls have been shoved into the boot camp that they both deserve, albeit one that hasn't seen any Mr. Clean for a couple of decades. (The other prisoners, in case you're wondering, are virtual ciphers who make occasional guest appearances. They're like extras in a Biblical epic.)

Kaplan is a decent director who usually pulls good performances from his leading ladies (Bonnie Bedelia in "Heart Like a Wheel" [1983] and, of course, Jodie Foster in "The Accused" [1988]), but there's not much you can do with something that's this shoddily written. It's hard to even tell who the movie is really about until a nutty little twist at the very end that hips you to the fact that you were supposed to be watching Danes all along.

Danes does a much better job than the miscast Beckinsale, but you still don't believe her. She's too sunny to properly convey slowly creeping darkness, and Beckinsale gets all the best bits of cockroach business.

"Brokedown Palace" wants to be a vision of hell without completely freaking out the "Melrose Place" contingent. There's bad language, quick nudity, some violence, and bugs, bugs, bugs. Rated PG-13. 100 minutes. CLASH DISRESPECT WARNING: Contains an unspeakably awful trip-hop version of "Rock the Casbah" that must be somebody's idea of a good idea.