Robert Redford Takes a Stand in The Prison Film ‘The Last Castle’
The Last Castle is a 2001 action thriller about a court-martialed General who rallies together twelve hundred inmates to rise against the corrupt system that put him away.
Prison movies tend to stick to the basics. You’ve got your innocent man wrongfully imprisoned, your collection of misfit inmates who take their sides, and of course, the corrupt warden overseeing it. Unless we’re talking about women. Then it’s all that and scrappy fighting … and shower scenes. Lots of shower scenes.
Either way, there’s a long history to the genre that has made for some very popular movies, with Frank Darabont‘s The Shawshank Redemption one of the most successful. That story, based on the book by Stephen King, is about friendship and trust and courage and, well, it’s just great. Watch it.
In 2001, director Rod Lurie, who was just coming off a highly-acclaimed year with his political thriller The Contender winning over critics, took up the mantle and released The Last Castle, a prison film with a twist of sorts, the setting being a military penitentiary and no plot to escape. Already interesting.
It stars Robert Redford, looking buff and chiseled, as a three-star general named Eugene Irwin. He’s a former Vietnam POW, a leader in the Gulf War and highly-decorated. But he went and disobeyed a direct presidential order to send troops into hostile territory, resulting in the death of a handful of soldiers. Stripped of his rank, he’s sentenced to ten years in prison, he forgoing a trial and looking to get it over with.
The maximum security prison itself is run by Col. Winter (James Gandolfini), who runs a tight ship (er, fort…this is NOT the Navy). He has this sort of SkyBox view of the camp’s yard, where the inmates spend much of the day, looking down on his men from behind thick glass. He’s a military artifacts collector, his expansive office like a mini museum of old bayonets, bullets and more. It’s what gives him the most pride, and also when Irwin arrives, his motivation for making life not so fun for the disgraced general. See, Irwin makes a remark to someone else that a man who collects such things has obviously never been in battle. Wrong move. Time for a showdown.
Out among the inmates, things are typically unsettled and criss-crossy, with a host of stereotypical men squaring off with a mousy in-between running a betting ring on boths sides. He’s played by Mark Ruffalo, the son of a man who was in the same POW camp as Irwin during Vietnam. It creates this dynamic that you can see where its going a mile away, and of the cast, leaves Ruffalo the most obvious and perhaps slightly irritating character, despite how good an actor he is.
The story centers on a battle for control between Irwin and Winter, us meant to choose Irwin for his laudable good will and honesty, despite his own turn at manipulation, something the movie sort of hints at with Winter himself advocating and commenting on such methods. That’s kinda smart. Winter aims to break the famous general and prove to the inmates that his prison has no favorites while Irwin sees a man corrupted by power, mistreating (even maiming and killing) men who cross him. That’s not. It’s an old thread but with Gandolfini chewing up scenery and Redford’s legendary presence, it’s hard not to get behind it. There’s plenty of flaws in the fabric here but it’s just too darned entertaining to really care. Sometimes we want to stick to basics and just have some fun.
Textbook plotting and uninspired direction hold it back, yet The Last Castle is generic good times, with bold characters and purposeful conflicts that set up all the right (and happily expected) dominoes, all falling in time and place to the right beat. Robin Wright shows up for what amounts to a cameo and is utterly wasted, but otherwise, there’s good work from others like Clifton Collins Jr. and a late-coming Delroy Lindo. Not a classic but well worth a night on the sofa.