Scott Adkins, British demolition man of direct-to-video legend, crash-lands once more into cinephile consciousness with Prisoner of War. The film is a noisy, bruised bauble—half martial arts boot camp, half cut-rate The Great Escape. Anyone who knows Adkins knows that he can jump-kick you out of your seat and wink while doing it. He possesses that odd, undervalued combination—real comic timing and real martial arts prowess—a pair rarely seen outside of 1980s Hong Kong, or perhaps the fever dreams of Cannon Films.
Let’s be direct: Prisoner of War is not a great movie. It’s barely a good one. But in the battered Adkins cinematic universe, currently littered with the remains of Diablo and Take Cover, even something this rickety feels like a minor triumph. That’s not intended as faint praise: only a true Adkins acolyte could watch this POW pastiche and come out the other side asking, “Why isn't this man a star?”
The recipe is simple. Adkins, as Wing Commander James Wright, crashes in Japanese-occupied Philippines, cyborg-straight, takes out a dozen enemy soldiers before his uniform even wrinkles, and finds himself in a camp run by Peter Shinkoda’s hulking sadist. So far, so adrenaline-laced. The first 20 minutes, all blood, sweat, and relentless velocity, suggest we might finally get the Adkins showcase Hollywood has always denied us.
But after those first, wild moments—when Adkins one-punches his way through a “super ripped” Japanese adversary who appears to have been plucked from an LA Gold’s Gym three decades early—the film’s voltage falls. Perhaps it’s the inevitable low-budget curse, or simply the oxygen being steadily sucked out by a supporting cast who appear to have wandered onto the set thinking this was a reality TV survival challenge, not a film shoot. Even Peter Shinkoda, a rare professional face among the foliage, can only glower so much before the script fails him.
Let’s address the performances: If you told me the producers collected the rest of the cast from the very same Philippine jungle in which Adkins is marooned, I might believe it. There are background players here who seem to be seeing a camera for the first time. Dialogue is delivered as if the lines are being sounded out phonetically. There’s an unintentionally hilarious absence of grit—these “starving” POWs might have wandered in from a spa day, faces clean, uniforms pressed. In this camp, even the war-torn seem moisturized.
The screenplay, leaping with the kind of logic gaps only a genre devotee could forgive, gives us a “good” Japanese soldier—a mystery of kindness whose motivations aren’t just left unspoken, they’re dropped in the jungle mud and never recovered. In a film of such self-serious intent, the absence of closure feels not just like bad writing but also an opportunity missed. Why bother to sketch a human connection if you immediately erase it?
And yet, I found myself grinning, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. There’s a modern umbrella, popping up in the misty World War II gloom—a relic from another epoch, winking at us, the audience, as if the filmmakers are inviting us in on a private joke or some inscrutable Easter egg. Or perhaps they simply forgot what century they were in. It’s this sort of gaffe that pulls you out of the drama, leaves you wondering if the POWs are also about to be rescued by a Tesla.
For all its faults (and there are many: incompetent editing, emotional beats that limp instead of land, set pieces that hint at grandeur before collapsing into routine), Prisoner of War is unashamedly an Adkins vehicle. And he drives it hard. There isn’t a frame here he doesn’t elevate, no matter how thankless—the choreography, the battered charisma, the sense (so rare now) that you’re watching a performer who genuinely understands and relishes the action hero tradition. Adkins’s work in Avengement hinted at what he could do given depth, but even here, waist-deep in clichés and surrounded by the barely upright, he is the only one who feels reality.
Which brings us to a more exasperating question: Why is Scott Adkins still relegated to these low-budget wastelands? He is, by all accounts, the real article—the sort of sturdy, bankable brute that the ‘80s and ‘90s used to worship, a man who could have been a contemporary of Van Damme, or even (were the world less perverse) an heir to the happier, pulp-driven days of Bronson or Norris. Yet year after year, Adkins seems bent under the weight of third-rate scripts and fourth-string co-stars, forced to single-handedly drag teetering direct-to-streaming films into the daylight.
There’s a pulse of real action-movie excitement here—a flicker that, if only it had been fanned brighter, could have become fire. Instead, we get a film whose ambitions are as thin as its budget; which delivers just enough to remind you what a waste it is when talent is left to rot in creative exile.
Still, for fans—the faithful, teeth-gritted survivors of Adkins’s recent output—Prisoner of War is a step up, a necessary shot of B-movie adrenaline, and proof that even inside a shoddily built cage, a genuine action star can make the bars rattle. As long as they put Scott Adkins in front of a camera and let him move, I’ll keep watching—even if I have to fight through a jungle of amateurs, anachronisms, and umbrellas to do it.
