Prisoner of War

Prisoner of War (2025) is a martial arts war film directed by Louis Mandylor, written by Marc Clebanoff from a story by star Scott Adkins. Adkins plays Wing Commander James Wright, a Royal Air Force officer shot down over the Philippines and taken by Japanese forces into a brutal prisoner-of-war camp during the earliest, darkest months of the Pacific war.

Inside the wire, survival is not simply a matter of enduring starvation and forced labour. The camp is overseen by Lieutenant Colonel Benjiro Ito (Peter Shinkoda), who stages bare-knuckle death matches between prisoners for the entertainment of his officers. Wright, a trained fighter, quickly becomes the camp's prize attraction — and discovers that every victory in the ring buys food, medicine and time for the men around him, at a cost to his own soul.

As Wright forms bonds with fellow captives — among them Captain Collins (Donald Cerrone), the Filipino soldier Villanueva (Michael Copon), Jonesy (Gary Cairns) and the man known only as The Beard (Michael Rene Walton) — talk turns from surviving the next bout to escaping altogether, with the looming spectre of the Bataan Death March pressing down on everyone in the compound. The film premiered at the Beverly Hills Film Festival on 3 April 2025 and was released in US cinemas and on VOD by Well Go USA on 19 September 2025.

At its heart, Prisoner of War argues that dignity is the last territory a man defends. Adkins conceived the story after being inspired by David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and the film inherits that classic's central preoccupation: what a soldier holds onto when rank, weapons, nation and even the war itself have been stripped away from him.

Mandylor stages the death matches not as spectacle for its own sake but as a moral trap. Every fight Wright wins keeps his comrades fed; every fight he wins also makes him a more valuable instrument of his captors' amusement. The film's message is that resistance is rarely heroic in the clean sense — it is compromised, humiliating, negotiated in inches, and its true measure is not whether you beat the man in front of you but whether you can still see him as a man.

By anchoring an action premise to the real history of the Bataan Death March, the film also insists on remembrance as a moral act: that the Filipino and Allied soldiers who died in that atrocity are owed something more than being a footnote, and that the genre muscle of a fight film can carry historical grief without cheapening it.

The film as straightforward war heroism. Read at face value, it is a tale of Allied endurance and eventual defiance — a man who refuses to be broken, and comrades who choose each other over self-preservation. On this reading the death matches are simply the obstacle course of an escape thriller.

Prisoner of War arrives as part of a broader push by Scott Adkins to move beyond pure fight vehicles into films with dramatic and historical weight. Coming from a story Adkins developed himself, the project is openly positioned as a descendant of the classic POW picture — The Bridge on the River Kwai above all — reimagined through the grammar of the martial arts tournament film. That hybrid is its main contribution: it fuses the prestige war-drama setting with the underground death-match subgenre, a combination the action press singled out as unusually effective.

Historically, the film's decision to build on the Bataan Death March gives it a stake in a memory that remains central to Filipino and American commemoration of the Pacific war. The presence of Filipino performers including Gabbi Garcia and Michael Copon, and shooting on location in the Philippines, tie the production to the ground the story depicts rather than to a generic backlot jungle.

Critically, the reception among genre outlets was strongly positive: reviewers described it as a savage, stripped-down and visceral martial arts war epic and repeatedly highlighted that Adkins reveals an emotional range beyond what audiences expect of him, playing Wright with a contained ferocity that erupts only when earned. Its festival route through the Beverly Hills Film Festival and Big Bad Film Fest before a Well Go USA theatrical-and-VOD release is characteristic of how contemporary action cinema builds word of mouth outside the studio system.

Praised: Genre critics responded warmly, describing the film as a savage, stripped-down and visceral martial arts war epic. The action design drew particular admiration for taking the underground death-match premise and wringing full value from it with fights that blend multiple styles. Reviewers also credited Mandylor's location work in the Philippines with giving the film a grimy authenticity that most DTV-budget war pictures never reach.

Adkins' performance: The most consistent point of praise was that this is a different Scott Adkins than audiences expect — playing Wright with understated intensity that erupts only at the right moments, and showing an emotional range that reviewers read as evidence of a serious dramatic actor behind the martial artist. That his own story concept underpins the film added to the sense of a passion project.

Points of debate: The chief tension viewers weigh is tonal — whether a fight-tournament framework can carry the historical weight of the Bataan Death March without trivialising it, and whether the film's most crowd-pleasing sequences sit comfortably alongside its atrocity setting. The R rating for strong violence signals just how unsparing the film is willing to be.

Verdict: Received as one of the standout action films of 2025 within the martial arts community, and as a genuine step up in ambition for the Adkins–Mandylor partnership.