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From the very opening frames of Prisoner of War—in which British SAS Officer James Wright, played with grim, kinetic precision by Scott Adkins, finds himself shot down over the Bataan Peninsula and hurled into the crushing apparatus of a Japanese POW camp—the film stakes its claim as a muscular, uncompromising hybrid: an homage to wartime epics and martial-arts gladiatorial spectacle all at once. Directed by Louis Mandylor, who steps behind the camera after a career in front of it, and bolstered by fight sequences choreographed by Alvin Hsing and stunt-coordinator Stephen Renney, this 2025 film pulls no punches—literally or figuratively—in its depiction of survival, honor, and one man’s refusal to bow to cruelty. On the surface it is straightforward: the men are captured, stripped of agency, degraded, forced to fight for the amusement of their captors—and yet, even while it traffics in genre comfort, the film shows signs of something deeper. It is flawed, no question; but it offers thrills, grit and backbone.
Adkins has built his veteran body of work on a foundation of physicality—his kicks and punches have become a calling card. Here he is given perhaps his most ambitious vehicle: a wartime setting, the historical gravitas of the Bataan Death March (though handled with lax specificity), and the emotional weight of a man driven not only by the instinct to survive but by the duty to save his fellow soldiers. The result is a performance in which Adkins doesn’t need to hide his body—his body is the message. He stares down his antagonists with a resolution that recalls the steely gaze of Charles Bronson, as one critic observed. In his best non-fight moments—scarce though they are—Adkins shows enough charisma to carry the scene, even if the script around him often falls short.
Visually the film is rugged, the settings harsh, the combats brutal and tangible. One reviewer noted that the camera “sticks physically close to Adkins and his opponents” rather than hiding behind quick cuts, a decision that empowers the choreography and rewards the viewer with an unvarnished sense of impact. The staging of the death-matches inside the camp is where the film works best: a grim fusion of gladiatorial ritual and POW desperation, where the audience sees not just fists and fury but the toll of humiliation, hunger and fear. And yet here lies the tension: the film wants you to feel the horror of war, the injustice of captivity, but also to thrill at the hand-to-hand combat. That dual ambition is at once the film’s strength and its burden.
Because when it attempts to flesh out its narrative armature, the cast of characters flattens. The prisoners are valorous and interchangeable; the Japanese officers are mostly sadistic archetypes; the Filipino nurse Theresa (Gabbi Garcia) flickers in and out like a ghost of possibility, never quite given space to matter. As one perceptive review warns, “the screenplay is a mess of illogical character motivations and a shallow plot that uses the weight of historical tragedy as little more than set-dressing.” The film borrows the scaffold of real atrocity—the Bataan Death March and the Japanese POW camps—but the historical specificity is under-explored. The result is a film that visually evokes the claustrophobia and violence of war, but narratively treats its context as a backdrop to a genre spectacle.
Despite that, there is something commendable in the film’s unabashed embrace of its genre. This is not masquerading as A-list prestige cinema, but a physical action film with ambitions—they may run ahead of the execution, yet their presence is felt. Fight fans will be rewarded: the choreography is crisp, the camera doesn’t cheat, and Adkins’s body becomes a map of battle scars, of endurance. The film calls to mind an earlier era of action cinema, where heroism meant grit and sweat and getting the job done, not post-modern self-reflexivity. “More than just a fight movie,” one review claimed, “a full-bodied throwback to physical action movies where the heroes really get their hands dirty.”
Mandylor as director shows promise: he understands how to frame a punch, how to let the camera linger on the pain in the man’s face, how to pace a fight so that rhythm, not just montage, resonates. But he also lets certain scenes drag: the transitions between brutal matches and escape planning sag under the weight of expectation. As the narrative shifts into prisoner-escape territory, the film seems to shrink into something familiar, less daring. As the critic Simon Abrams put it: “This movie never makes Wright’s circumstances seem that threatening for him, though, which only gives him so much room to flex.” That is a fair criticism: the stakes at times feel locked to the choreography rather than to the human cost, and one almost wishes the film would give more space to the men behind the gloves.
It’s a curious mixture of triumph and compromise. On one hand, the film delivers what fans of Adkins and martial-arts war mash-ups will desire: hand-to-hand and foot-to-torso combat executed with a fierce clarity, an emphasis on the body in motion, as though war had paused to stage a boxing ring in the tropics. On the other hand, there is a nagging sense that the film could have asked more of itself—to deepen its characters, to interrogate the colonial or racial dynamics of a British SAS officer among mostly American prisoners (the cast is overwhelmingly white, a “white-western-centric” frame one reviewer lamented). The historical horror of the Bataan death march and POW camps demands gravity; the film gives spectacle.
Yet spectacle, when handled deftly, can carry its own weight—and here the film largely succeeds. The sense of captivity, of forced fights, the wiring of brutality and survival—that works. The final confrontation in the dojo, the circular return to post-war reckoning, gives the film a tributary of closure: Wright’s past catches up to him, his enemy becomes himself, and the cycle of violence and redemption loops back. It is elegant in idea, even if the execution dips into familiar territory. And it is in those fight-scenes—where the camera doesn’t shy away, where the motion carries conviction—that the film finds its beating heart.
For viewers coming to Prisoner of War expecting a sprawling, meditation-on‐evil war drama, they will likely find their expectations only partly met. But for those looking for something visceral, who believe that action can have artistry and that discipline in the choreographed body can echo discipline in the scarred soul—this film will deliver. Adkins is no longer merely the silent kick-king; here, he shoulders a genre, steps into a larger frame, and proves that his métier can reach beyond halls of tournament spectacle. Whether the film itself scales symphonically to that ambition is debatable. But the effort matters.
In the end Prisoner of War is less than the magnificent war-epic it might have aspired to become; it is more than the standard martial-arts vehicle its title might suggest. It lives between the two, entwined like a fist and a gun, a warrior and an escapee, a man stripped of freedom and yet unbowed. For all its narrative shortcuts and character flattening, it carries a pulse. It invites you to watch not only the hits, but the body taking the hits—and to feel, momentarily, that the cost of freedom is fought in motion.
If you come for the fight, stay for the endurance. And perhaps, just perhaps, you might feel the trembling of something more: the ghost of war, the echo of a man’s will, and the scars left behind—not only on flesh, but on memory.
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