A PRAYER BEFORE DAWN: Violent Biopic That Pulls Its Punches

Billy Moore’s life story is ripe for the big screen treatment. Thrown into a notoriously violent Thai prison thousands of miles from his home in Liverpool, and suffering from a drug addiction that continued to destabilise him mentally, he had to turn to Muay Thai boxing tournaments to fight his way to freedom. His memoir documenting the gruelling three years behind the bars of this prison became a bestseller, and the release of this adaptation offers an unspoken underlying tragedy as in the real world, Billy Moore has found himself in prison again – only this time in Her Majesty’s Prison Service.

A Dynamic True Story Transformed into a Cliched Prison Drama

And yet, director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s film, his sophomore feature following 2009’s Johnny Mad Dog, never ventures below the surface of this harrowing true story. It never becomes a gruelling Midnight Express inflected prison drama, nor does it have the bone crunchingly violent credentials of a film like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives – instead, it treats the true story as a combination of prison drama and underdog sports movie cliches, but with a moodier sense of style that kept me at arm’s length at all times despite the rousing narrative trajectory. Despite the blood curdling nature of Muay Thai boxing and the suffocating prison environment, A Prayer Before Dawn pulls its punches repeatedly.

Joe Cole stars as Billy Moore, who we are introduced to outside prison walls, enjoying the drug fuelled debauchery that comes hand in hand with being a semi-successful boxer. After his flat gets raided by cops, he’s thrown into one of Thailand’s most notorious jails, and finds his existence threatened straight away by the various gang members he’s locked away with. The communal sleeping area, used as the sleeping quarters for all the prison inmates, is where Billy realises the widespread horrors of what goes on behind these bars. The final straw is witnessing a horrific attack on a young prisoner, who takes his own life to a borderline indifference by the prison afterwards.

After hearing that participants in the prison’s Muay Thai Boxing tournaments get to leave the prison to compete, and have slightly more favourable living conditions due to their sporting success, Billy attempts to join the team. The only problem is one of economics, as prison corruption means he has to pay to get in; luckily, a blossoming friendship with a transgender female inmate named Fame (Pornchanok Mabklang) sees him develop a get rich quick scheme to get himself into the ring.

It isn’t until A Prayer Before Dawn’s postscript that audiences are reminded that this is a dramatisation of a true story – and, when the storytelling on display is as stereotypical for the genre as conceivable, it’s easy to forget that this is more than a mere dramatic construct. This isn’t to say Billy Moore’s life story isn’t interesting, as it’s clearly ripe to be told on the big screen.

But there’s an ever so slight detachment between the director and the emotional core of the story that stops it from having the impact that it should. Irritatingly, this detachment isn’t justified by any interesting stylish techniques; with the exception of some woozy strip club footage at the start of the film, Sauvaire’s visual sensibility is restrained, with the familiarity of the story being told stopping it from ever falling over into gritty realism.

Partially saved by an excellent lead performance

Sauvaire has only recognised the surface of Moore’s true story, ticking off all the events he suffered through, while reconfiguring them so they feel entirely conventional for a film within this genre. A story with a distinctive character feels overly familiar in his hands, with only a charismatic lead performance from Joe Cole offering anything in the way of a distinctive identity. Cole manages to sell the accumulative effect of the character’s personal demons, and sheer desperation for survival and escape, in a way that transcends the fairly pedestrian storytelling at hand.

As the film slowly succumbs to a stereotypical sports movie narrative in the second half, Cole’s performance is the one thing engineering a consistent sense of excitement, and genuine unpredictability – you may know where the story is headed, but Cole’s ability to find the vulnerability beneath the “hard man” persona adds an extra dimension to the fairly rote storytelling. It isn’t enough to render the film significantly more interesting, but the lacklustre film around it does nothing to dilute the strength of the performance.

The action beats fall largely flat, despite the sport of Muay Thai boxing being central to the story. Moments that should be visceral are staged somewhat awkwardly, struggling to keep up with Cole’s physicality – and without wanting to sound like David Ehrlich’s Gareth Evans would have done with this.

A director who has an innate understanding of action is central to making this story work, even though Billy’s ascension to the prison team is entirely confined to the film’s second hour. Sauvaire can competently tell a dramatic story, as familiar as it may be, but without the ability to stage the fights so integral to the narrative (even though the final product is considerably not an action film) an element so important to understanding the central character has been erased.

A Prayer Before Dawn: Conclusion

A Prayer Before Dawn boasts a fantastic central performance from Joe Cole, but unfortunately, wastes an astonishing true story in favour of genre cliches and a surprising indifference to actually depicting the sport that helped Billy Moore get closer to freedom. Moore’s story deserves a better big screen treatment than what director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has served up.

A Prayer Before Dawn will be released in the UK on July 20, 2018, and in the US on August 10, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.