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”This is your brain on a cheap high-school graduation trip to Southeast Asia. This is your brain on a cheap high-school graduation trip to Southeast Asia after you and your best friend get wrongly busted by a corrupt third-world justice system for smuggling drugs and tossed into a hellish, sweaty prison where roaches crawl into your ears at night and throw little roach keg parties. Any questions?”
In what could be a collaboration from the Travel Channel, VH1, and Court TV, Brokedown Palace stars Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale (The Last Days of Disco) as Alice and Darlene, lifelong friends who are a little like Tom and Huck if you allow that Alice is actually Tom and Huck. They’ve planned a trip to Hawaii for one last fling before Darlene heads off to college and blue-collar Alice furthers a career in motel housekeeping. But willful, adventurous Alice suggests that Thailand would be both cheaper and less middle-class, so guess where they wind up going? For a couple days they get to see lots of gorgeous Thai pageantry set to Sarah McLachlan music until a smooth Aussie chap bails them out when they sneak into a four-star hotel for fruity drinks and a siesta by the pool. A game of musical babes ensues, prompting jealousy that makes things seem even worse when, while boarding a flight to Hong Kong that he talked Darlene into and Darlene talked Alice into, gun-toting soldiers arrest them for hiding several kilos of heroin in their luggage. In highly questionable but hardly unusual proceedings, they are first allowed only to plea either guilty and get 40 years, or not guilty and get life for their impenitence, until an expatriate lawyer named “Yankee Hank” Greene (Bill Pullman) takes their case after first extracting $15,000 from their parents. Will Hank get them off? Will Alice and Darlene keep their new WeedEater haircuts? Will Sarah McLachlan ever stop singing?
Claire fans, some of whom might have seen the somewhat similar Return to Paradise, but more than likely not the definitive film on imprisoned American smugglers, Midnight Express, will probably love Brokedown Palace, since she essentially gets to play all the characters: she starts out rude and defiant, which worsens their treatment in prison; then she gets all obsequious with the locals and their language, which earns them points; and in the end she pretty much takes over the whole show. What they won’t notice as much is plot problems such as the virtual absence of the girls’ families while their fates hang in the balance, the near-total lack of insight to Pullman’s character, who’s greedy as hell one minute and all Perry Mason concerned the next, and of course the incessant Sarah. What is ostensibly a story about how two inseparable friends with diametrically opposed personalities cope with a real live nightmare gets lost in heroine (please note the spelling) worship. But it’s about what you’d expect from a couple first-time writers and the director of the all-distaff Western, Bad Girls. There is one valuable lesson here though, even moreso than the warning about fast-talking smugglers: always stick plugs in your ears before going to sleep in Thailand -- it keeps out the bugs and the Sarah... C
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