Brokedown Palace is a 1999 American drama film directed by Jonathan Kaplan, and starring Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale, and Bill Pullman.

While boarding their flight at Don Mueang International Airport, the girls are detained by the Thai police and shocked to discover that one of their bags contains heroin, which they insist must have been planted by Nick.

Warned that Parks has influential friends in the Thai government, Hank arranges a deal with a corrupt prosecutor to secure a pardon for the girls if they recant their claim about his involvement and take full responsibility for smuggling the drugs.

Producer Adam Fields was inspired to make the film based on interviews he conducted with young American women serving life sentences in a Thailand prison for drug-related offenses, as well as with U.S. Embassy and Drug Enforcement Agency officials in Bangkok.

Fields said the idea traces back to "'the self-assurance and naive arrogance I certainly had as an American teenager when I wanted to go to London or Amsterdam or Morocco and I said to my parents, 'I'm 16, I'm grown up, I ride the New York subways—what could happen?

And I also think that when one girl [Danes' Alice] is incredibly needy and doesn't want to let go, and the other one [Beckinsale's Darlene] is ready to go out into the world, it's a major rite of passage that's almost a death—and a very compelling story.

The prison scenes were shot inside the Sanctuary Center for Psychotic Female Vagrants, a mental asylum for women operated by the DSWD in Mandaluyong, Manila.

Amanda de Cadenet, who has a role in the film as a prisoner, recounted how disgruntled patients would sometimes throw faeces over the dividing wall in protest.

[8][9][10] Danes issued an apology, explaining "because of the subject matter of 'Brokedown Palace,' the cast was exposed to the darker and more impoverished places of Manila,” rather than the tourist-friendly areas.

[13] Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote "Although the basic premise of the movie is similar to that of the better, more complex 'Return to Paradise,' which was set in Malaysia, ‘Brokedown Palace’, which tells the story of Alice's redemption from brattiness to something verging on martyrdom, rides on the steady emotional current of Ms. Danes' fine performance.

Because the character of Darlene never comes into focus, the central theme of a close friendship put to the ultimate test isn't as compelling as it ought to be", and "at the very least, [the film] offers a disturbing reminder that being a willfully ignorant ugly American abroad with an attitude could be a recipe for disaster.