Movie review - Prisoner of War

Prisoner of War *** (out of 5) I should start with declaring myself to be a solid Scott Adkins fan. His martial arts movies - even the cheapies – reliably deliver on the action sequences that motivate our eyes to look at his screen time. And rightly so. He’s pursued training in multiple disciplines since he was 10. That was more than a decade before he began acting. His career has placed him mostly in hero roles (including a few action comedies), though he’s excelled as a villain, too. He played a brutal, racist GI in Ip Man 4: The Finale (2019); He was comically unrecognizable, yet surprisingly agile, as a crime boss in a massive fat suit opposite Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023). He’s probably best known for playing Yuri Boyka in three of the four flicks in the Undisputed franchise – the ones earning higher ratings than the original.

But my favorites are his one-man army gigs as the tough hero overcoming long odds. This film is not the ideal vehicle for showing his chopsocky chops. It’s a rather standard tale, set in WW II, as Scott is a downed RAF fighter pilot captured by the Japanese in 1942 and held in a Philippine prison camp under the thumb of a sadistic officer. He and a handful of fellow captives must endure extreme hardships, tortures and executions before the inevitable escape. The only suspense is who else will join him, plus a little novelty in how they do it.

I say little suspense because the opening scene is in 1950, when Scott enters a dojo and beats up the whole school, looking for the former commandant who runs it. That sequence is reminiscent of times that stars like Donnie Yen and Bruce Lee did the same to prove Chinese Kung Fu is better than Karate, and the occupying Japanese are not their superiors. Scott’s agenda is more personal. Before that plays out further, they quickly cut back to his plane crashing in the jungle and fill in the gap from there on.

There’s nothing special about the performances or the plot, the latter of which is as generic as the title. The character types, conflicts and strategies are quite familiar to action fans. Scott’s fights, as expected, are the highlights, along with a twist at the end that upgrades the package. If you’re looking for escapism about an escape, this one will serve quite adequately, albeit less than top of the line.

(Prisoner of War, mostly in English, debuts on Blu-ray on Veterans’ Day, 11/11/25, from Well Go USA.)