"The Last Castle"

Redford and Gandolfini have a battle of wills in this very manly prison movie from the director of "The Contender."

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct 19, 2001 | Rod Lurie's very manly movie "The Last Castle" opens and ends with an American flag being flown proudly -- rippling in the bright, cold, free air -- above the spartan windows and turrets of a military prison that resembles a castle. Even in a climate where many Americans have a renewed fondness for the Stars and Stripes (I've always been more of a Union Jack miniskirt girl myself, and even I've taken more warmly to it these days), those flags are a bit much. Ditto the way rufty-tufty prison warden Colonel Winter (James Gandolfini), when he's not busy ordering his goons to blam random prisoners with rubber bullets for no good reason, lovingly polishes his antique military firearms. (The camera lingers on the sight of the soft cloth caressing the metal -- oh, the irony!)

It all adds up to something, but it's not as big a something as Lurie would like to believe: The message of "The Last Castle" is that following military rules blindly is a very, very bad thing, but that following a quietly powerful and charismatic military leader -- in this case, Robert Redford's disgraced three-star General Irwin -- is a very, very good thing. In other words, if you just figure out your proper role and learn how to play it, everything will turn out for the best.

In "The Last Castle," the trouble begins when the disgraced but ever-dignified General Irwin is transferred to "the Castle," a maximum-security military prison in which hundreds of convicts suffer under Colonel Winter's iron rule. Irwin makes it known almost immediately that he has no respect for Winter; Winter fights back by trying to break him. The animosity between the two escalates until Irwin -- who has rather effortlessly earned the trust of his fellow inmates, including the surly Yates (Mark Ruffalo), whose dad served under Irwin during the Vietnam War -- hatches a plan to undermine Winter's power.

"The Last Castle" isn't aggressively pro-military in the worst way, but Lurie (along with writers David Scarpa and Graham Yost) seems to be walking pretty gingerly along the top of a very narrow and rickety fence. "The Last Castle" desperately wants to be the "Henry V" of prison revolt movies -- a picture that makes you understand the value of war when it's absolutely necessary, by coaxing you to sympathize with a ragtag group of prisoners who are clearly oppressed. But the themes that ring out most loudly in the end -- some men are just born leaders; others do best if they just conform -- are numbingly retrograde. "The Last Castle" is comfortably conservative without being particularly exciting.

For one thing, the conflict between Gandolfini's Winter and Redford's Irwin doesn't crackle nearly as much as it should. Gandolfini, playing one of those "small" men who puffs up his stature by being a by-the-book bully, pulls off some cleverly timed jokes -- he doesn't make the mistake of chomping down on his role, as some less intuitive actors might, and it makes him an enjoyable villain most of the time.

Next Page: Redford looks better than he has in years

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