Jailbreak (2017)

Jailbreak (2017)

Starring: Jean-Paul Ly, Dara Our, Celine Tran, Tharoth Sam, Dara Phang, Tiger Reth, Sok Visal, Laurent Plancel

Director: Jimmy Henderson

Action Director: Jean-Paul Ly, Dara Our

Jailbreak was an inevitability. Southeast Asia got the spotlight in 2003 when Tony Jaa, Panna Rittikrai, and Prachya Pinkaew gave us Ong Bak and reminded the world that a back-to-basics martial arts/stuntwork thriller in the vintage Jackie Chan mold. A few years later, Vietnam joined suit with The Rebel, starring Johnny Tri Nguyen (who had had a small villain role in said trio’s Tom Yung Goong / The Protector) and Veronica Ngo (who has gone on to work in Hollywood). The year after that, Malaysia tried its hand at martial arts filmmaking with Four Dragons, which sadly sucked. Then Welsh director Gareth Evans went to Indonesia and made history alongside Iko Uwais with Merantau, followed by the world-famous The Raid duology. So, it was only a matter a time before other countries like Cambodia would get in on the action. 

(OBS: A brief look at the IMDB shows that Laos and Myanmar might have their own martial arts films, but I can’t find any information about them)

Jailbreak is the product of Italian-English filmmaker Jimmy Henderson and English writer Michael Hodgson, both of whom relocated from Europe to Cambodia to work in film. Both men are active to this day, with their last film being The Last Ritual, a horror movie from 2024. The script is pretty simple: it is basically The Raid, but in a prison. I find it interesting we often define films as “[X movie], but —" The most famous example is with Die Hard: “Under Siege is Die Hard on a boat”; “Passenger 57 is Die Hard on an airplane”; “Project Shadowchaser is Die Hard with a cyborg”; “City Hunter is Die Hard, but with Jackie Chan in drag”; etc. So, “The Raid, but—” refers to an action movie in which a small number of protagonists trapped in a finite area, usually a building, with a large number of villains.

The premise is exceedingly simple. The only male member of the infamous Butterfly Gang has been arrested and has promised to the authorities that he will reveal the identity of it female leader: Madame Butterfly (former porn actress Céline Tran). Of course, Madame Butterfly cannot have this, so she has her army of female assassins try to knock him off. A group of Cambodian SWAT team members, including Dara (Dara Our, of Hanuman), Sucheat (Dara Phang, of Killing Time Violently), and a female officer, Tharoth (Tharoth Sam, of The Lockdown). Joining them is a French agent of Asian extraction, Jean-Paul (Jean-Paul Ly, of Nightshooters), who has been assigned to the Butterfly Gang case. 

The Butterfly Gang’s initial attempts to murder their own member fail and the our heroes are able to get the guy to the prison. But some of the female assassins show up at the prison and convince one of the harder inmates, Bolo (Sisowath Siriwudd, of Hex), to kill the guy. Him and another prison inmate who works in the infirmary (Tiger Reth?) are able to kill some guards and break loose. They make more confusion by releasing the entirety of their prison gang, the Scorpions, into the prison. So, now the three Cambodians and Jean-Paul have a small army of criminals to fight through in order to save the Butterfly Gang member. But he is able to evade capture by releasing both the entire Gecko Gang (the rival prison gang) and the prison’s most dangerous criminals: Cannibal (Eh Phoutong, also of Hanuman) and Suicide (Laurent Plancel, a French martial artist working as a Hollywood stuntman). So, will our heroes (and the one competent prison guard who is with them) have enough energy to fight off an entire army of inmates in order to secure the witness? And what about when Madame Butterfly and her assassins decide to get personally involved.

So yeah, Jailbreak is basically The Raid by way of Death Warrant…or Half Past Dead. Or just “The Raid, but in a jail.” Whatever. The premise is simple and mainly exists to set up one fight sequence after the other. Gareth Evans was talented enough to break up the brutal martial arts segments with moments of suspense, like Iko Uwais hiding behind the television or the SWAT team holing up in a room before trying to break through the floor and get out via the next floor down. There is no character development, except for a brief moment of romantic tension between Jean-Paul and Tharoth. There are three groups of villains, although the film does the scant script a disservice by establishing that the Butterfly Gang’s female assassins have entered the prison at one point, but not have any of them fight (except for Céline Tran herself). In fact, two seconds after the girls arrive at the prison, the film forgets that the underling chicks are even a thing.

The fights were staged by Jean-Paul Ly and Dara Our, the film’s main stars. Jean-Paul Ly is actually a half-Chinese, half-Cambodian martial artist whose background includes a multitude of styles: Hapkido, Karate, Capoeira, and “tricking” (or parkour).  Ly had been working as a stuntman in Hollywood and the UK for a few years when Jimmy Henderson invited him to star in this. Dara Our is trained in Bokator, a traditional Cambodian martial art. Early on in the film, we see Dara training with one of his fellow officers and Jean-Paul asks him if he’s using Muay Thai. He responds that he’s using Bokator, which is interesting, because Cambodian does have its own iteration of Muay Thai, known as Kun Khmer, or Pradal Serey. Technically, Kun Khmer is derived from Bokator, which is an older and more varied warrior art and whose curriculum included hand-to-hand combat, wrestling, and weapons.

There is a lot of fighting. My favorite fight is early on when Jean-Paul is accosted by a group of prisoners in the prison restroom, which quickly escalates into a huge group melee in the showers. This is earlier in the film, so our heroes all still have their night sticks (or tonfa) to fight with and I love a good tonfa fight. There is a big fight between Dara, Sucheat, the prison guard, and the Gecko gang, which gets surprisingly brutal at the end (given that Sucheat is portrayed as a coward who just wants to run to safety). Jean-Paul gets to fight against Suicide in a nicely-choreographed one-on-one that might’ve been my favorite fight had Ly’s comeback hadn’t been so rushed. Meanwhile, Dara takes on The Cannibal in a one of those “fighter verus mountain of muscle” fights that is more vicious than technique-driven. The climax consists of three individual one-on-one’s: Jean-Paul vs. Bolo; Dara vs. the high-kicking infirmary prisoner; and finally Tharoth vs. Madame Butterfly, in a brutal fight involving fisticuffs and a katana. 

As a successor to the Raid films and Southeast Asian MA cinema in general, Jailbreak does its job nicely on a pure choreography basis. It does not reinvent the wheel, but it does represent Cambodian martial arts in a way that brings to mind Thai and Indonesian films, even if the film on the whole is a lot less polished than those countries’ efforts. I don’t think any of the final fights reach the level of that first group scuffle, but it’s solid all around. It is a good start, and a much better one that that crappy Four Dragons. I hope that they can do more of that, although it has been 8 years now, so I don’t know.