PRISONER OF WAR (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Prisoner of War, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

James Wright (Scott Adkins), a British Air Force pilot and prisoner of war during World War II in Bataan, doesn't understand why he's repeatedly forced to fight against the most skilled fighters the camp's commander has to offer. One wonders if Prisoner of War itself even has an answer to that question beyond the obvious one: The guy has to fight so that story doesn't come to a quick end.

The biggest mystery, then, rests in that commander. He's Lt. Col. Ito (Peter Shinkoda), a ruthless and murderous officer in the Japanese Army currently occupying that peninsula in the Philippines. Ito does not hesitate to execute other prisoners and even some of his own men to prove the point that he is in control.

Most of his victims are nameless, otherwise anonymous Filipino locals, but he also does occasionally kill assorted American prisoners, too. His cruelty is obvious, but the movie's flippant attitude toward these atrocities, based on very real ones that continued even after the point of the story's supposedly inspiring ending, comes through in how little it cares about anything apart from giving James a string of fights.

Ito has a motive for pitting James against several of his soldiers. He tells his right-hand man (played by Masanori Mimoto) that it's to demoralize the other prisoners, who will watch this man, so skilled in assorted fighting techniques and strong in general, brought low. That explanation becomes moot, of course, after James is victorious in the second round of those fights. At that point, Ito simply looks incompetent, foolish, and/or lacking any kind of psychological awareness.

He's unintentionally rallying the prisoners to find a way to escape and fight back, while making his own men wonder why he doesn't just kill James, a man who was supposed to be executed immediately after his capture. He ends up killing his executioners, and instead of finishing the task in a straightforward manner, Ito puts him in a battle to the death, which James quickly wins both physically, by pummeling the man, and morally, by refusing to kill his opponent.

At a certain point in Marc Clebanoff's screenplay, we simply have to accept that, as a character, Ito makes no sense. He does have another reason to keep James alive and fighting, although the realization is that it's because the British pilot, who has traveled the world to learn from various schools of fighting, knows a "forbidden" move in the technique in which Ito trained. The only thing that's possibly sillier than Ito's plan to convince James to teach him this move—by tormenting him, forcing him to fight over and over, and killing a lot of other prisoners—might be the movie itself. It's a punch that begins with James shaking his open hand, as if he's transferring all of the power in his body into the fist that forms.

Thankfully, Ito only exists as a plot device here, although, since the movie is entirely about its plot, that's not much of an advantage. That plot is very simple. James, who immediately earns the respect of the American prisoners led by highest-ranking officer Capt. Collins (Cowboy Cerrone), tries to find a way for as many POWs to escape the camp as possible. The battle being waged beyond the camp isn't going well for the Japanese forces at the moment, and if Ito doesn't kill everyone, word has come that there's a plan to transfer the prisoners to a different camp. It would be a death march, as the actual event that has inspired this shallow movie is historically called.

James does come up with a plan, which involves so much luck and perfect timing that it's best, like a lot of the story elements here, not to think about too much. As James arranges that with the aid of fellow prisoners like Villanueva (Michael Copon) and a man known only as "the Beard" (Michael Rene Walton), Ito keeps forcing the seemingly invincible prisoner into a makeshift fighting circle. One would think the commander would have the sense to stop promising that James will die during the next fight after two or three of them, but instead, it just becomes a joke.

To be fair, Adkins is a commanding presence as the honorable brawler, and director Louis Mandylor knows to stage and shoot the assorted fights with a focus on his star's obvious skills. They're as rousing as they can be under the circumstances, then.

The problem, of course, is that the circumstances include a plot that clearly exists only as an excuse for these fight scenes, a villain who makes little to no sense, and using real war crimes as the backdrop of a generic action movie. Prisoner of War has a lot working against it, in other words, and no amount of fine fight choreography can hide or make up for those things.

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