Purely Joyful Movie!

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Why do all the movies & documentaries about white Americans in particular imply that they are innocent victims of barbaric third world countries' drug laws? They are depicted as completely gullible, innocently duped, scammed, coerced, or just trying to make ends meet by doing one innocent drug deal. The stories always go out of their way to make the audience enraged about the inhumane conditions outside the enlightened modern day humane U.S. system. In fact, abuses of this sort and worse happen daily in this country. The mentally ill, underage, and poor are physically, emotionally and psychologically tormented and permanently scarred. Isolation, rapes, beatings, huge financial profits by privatized prisons in this country have created a mass incarceration system that now moves babies with tantrums into the prison system for profit. Young ppl, especially minorities are economic fodder for this human rights disgrace because if you build it, you must fill it. The Pa. judges were putting young ppl, students (and they were white) into jails for truancy, disrespecting teachers by drawing unflattering pictures of them by the students and all sorts of excuses so the judges who had stock in these detention facilities as shareholders could increase their profits. We live in a country that imprisons more ppl than communist China, Russia and N. Korea together. 10s of thousands of ppl per day are arrested. 85% of them are never formally charged or convicted, but this allows overtime and monies to be made by the ruling oligarchy. Tax free padded police pensions in New York, judges' salaries, corp supply companies-food, laundry, etc.-all profit in the 100s of billions from the corrupt mega corp that is the U.S. injustice system.An aside regarding the authenticity of the story-How did the protagonist keep her gray hair in check all that time? The prison must have allowed Lady Clairol to visit along with the Botox/Juvederm/and plastic surgery touch-ups. Anothe problem with American TV-too much Hollywood.The daughter plays a nun who wears make-up.

Very-well-acted drama based on the jailing of an American tourist on trumped-up drug charges in Ecuador.Barbara Hershey is convincing as a woman from Hollywood, Fla., who takes her first trip outside of the US only to get thrown into brutal, filthy El Inca prison, where the guards are sexual predators and inmates act as enforcers.Rachel Leigh Cook excels as Chase's daughter, who suffers a psychological imprisonment of her own knowing how her mother suffers in a sordid place in which she can't speak the language, lacks treatment for her scleroderma, and gets beaten and robbed with regularity.Strong supporting performances come from Colombian actress Rita Bendak, as a cruelly manipulative lifer, and Cristina Marchand playing a nun who risks her own safety to help the Chase family.After many disappointing twists and turns, and 22 months that left her wobbly but still on her feet, Chase won her freedom in 2007, with the help of Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Jacksonville). The movie concludes with what looks like actual footage of the real Chase and her daughter ecstatically embracing at their airport reunion. If you follow the National Geographic Channel series "Locked Up Abroad," this movie may seem like the extended version of a particularly gripping episode. In all, it's a sobering reminder that life can take some unlikely and deeply troubling detours.

I am Ecuadorian Citizen and I am very familiar, off course, with how towns look like, as well streets, people, jails, sceneries, laws, etc. The first fake things I watched like towns, music, people, the way people speaks Spanish, the horrendous inner jails world and legal system did move me to a scrutiny attitude; it's like watching a true history happened in the US and filmed in any other country. Americans would notice it immediately. I don't understand why, if the movie is related to a true history happened in Ecuador, why they had to film in a totally different locations? Everything in the "Ecuadorian" environment is Colombian. Perhaps someone could tell me that filming in Ecuador would be very dangerous, but that is not true once more. So it would be very smart and fair that the movie Productors made clear the year that this story happened, because right now at this very moment, Ecuador, a small country but one of the most beautiful in the whole world, is the home of thousands of retired Americans where they live happy. And I don't think they would stay there for 24 hours knowing the "inhumanity chaos" supposedly happening there. It's just to honor the people who suffered this terrible time, Ecuador and us, the spectators.

It's another in the "Americans are never guilty" parade of films. The notion that US citizens are always duped victims in drug smuggling cases is naive at best. While they may not deliberately smuggle drugs in all cases, having worked in travel for many years I can declare that US citizens can be extremely gullible when abroad and equally gullible that "I'm a US citizen" immunizes them from local laws. This is a quite nicely predictable "US citizen unjustly imprisoned" film, and all the predictable people are evil and in league against the poor US citizen. That Americans are naive does not mean they are immune to legal consequences. "I was suckered" is too frequently heard abroad to serve as a defense. And being familiar with Ecuadorian government and law, I can say that they are not exactly the rampant fascists portrayed in this film