It tells the tale of Kat Stanton (Kidman), a young Australian girl who, following the death of her mother, takes off to find her absentee father. She ends up in Thailand where unbeknownst to her a guy she hooks up with plants a large stash of drugs in her luggage and she ends up taking the fall. The harsh penal system allows her no leeway, she can either claim responsibility for the drugs and be charged with possession and get life in prison or she can deny it and be charged with trafficking which is a death sentence. Her lawyer (Hugo Weaving- The Matrix, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Lord of the Rings) struggles with the penal system and just so happens to know her father (Denholm Elliott- Trading Places, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Brimstone and Treacle).

I cannot escape the obvious comparisons- in the realm of imprisoned travelers in unforgiving foreign lands, Bangkok Hilton is no Midnight Express. Its not even Brokedown Palace or Return to Paradise.

Now, that's not to say I'm going to lay into this movie and tear it a new one. It is hard to judge the film. Even if it wasn't a more lightweight affair like a tv movie, this DVD has a huge problem with its presentation of the story. This is a Korean based transfer of the film, and, in some misguided effort, the mini-series has been edited, chopped, and squished into a scant hour and thirty minute running time. So, it is really impossible to critique the film fairly because the hack job done with the editing is clumsy and full of hideous holes. Even the music cues are edited badly.

What serves, to me, as the most interesting aspect of the story, surviving in a nearly sub-human foreign prison, is largely left on the cutting room floor and the story finds a narrowed focus on her lawyers fight to save her and her father trying to reconcile with the daughter he abandoned. The DVD editing makes it a mess, and it appeared like the tv-movie aspect made the film feel like it was pulling its punches of really portraying any truth. It seemed settled on riding cliches and stuff like Kidman still looking pretty hot despite the fact that a guard throws a bucket of diarrhea on her.

The DVD: Star Media

Picture: Full-screen. A made for tv production and it looks like it. Now, I'm not familiar at a ll with Australian tv or their quality standards, so it is somewhat difficult to judge if this is a bad transfer or a just a low budget production to begin with. As it stands, the image is very grainy. The colors are not particularly striking and the sharpness is middling. I'll lean towards thinking the actual production probably wasn't a tight clean affair and most of the image issues can be chalked up to working within the confines of a limited budget.

Sound:Dolby Digital 5.1 English with optional Korean subtitles. Once again, very basic. The dialogue recoding is often pretty noisy and the rest of it, the fx and music, is pretty forgettable.

Extras: Nothing.

Conclusion: Even if you're a Kidman fan looking for a nice obscurity, this is not the one to get. A truncated version of a much longer work, the editing makes it pretty unwatchable.