'Last Castle' simplistic yet stands tall as prison drama

The new Robert Redford vehicle, "The Last Castle," is the first of what may be a new breed in Hollywood: the Sept. 11 movie. It celebrates honor, duty, country. It promotes pro-military values. It leaves us with a full-screen image of a rippling American flag.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE LAST CASTLE

DIRECTOR: Rod Lurie

CAST: Robert Redford,

James Gandolfini, Mark Ruffalo

RUNNING TIME: 131 minutes

RATING: R for language and violence

WHERE: Bella Bottega, Cinema 17, Crossroads, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria 11, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Longston 14, Metro, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Parkway Plaza, Renton Village, SeaTac North, Woodinville 12.

GRADE: B

It's not clear if this is an amazing bit of prescience on the part of Redford, DreamWorks and director Rod Lurie ("The Contender") or the result of last-minute tinkering. More likely, it's the latter, since the film was still being frantically edited only a few weeks ago.

The sentiment has a bit of a tagged-on feeling, and may come at the expense of the complexities of the Redford character. But it's not completely forced, it rises out of the situation with some degree of subtlety and, if nothing else, it makes the film feel timely.

Redford plays a three-star U.S. Army general, a survivor of the Hanoi Hilton and a brilliant military strategist who has been court-martialed, busted and sentenced to hard time in a Leavenworth-like military prison for a campaign in Africa that went very bad.

His nemesis is the prison's commanding officer/warden (James Gandolfini), a bureaucratic-minded Army colonel with little or no combat experience who worships the general but overhears an implied insult on the unlikely prisoner's first day and fast becomes his tormentor.

At first, the general wants only to do his time and stay out of trouble. But as he glimpses the corruption and inhumanity of the prison administration, he rallies the prisoners by appealing to their honor, self-respect and soldierly instincts, and tries to bring the warden down.


	Doing time for a bungled military operation, an Army general (Robert Redford, right) rallies inmates to confront his tormenter, the prison's commanding officer (James Gandolfini, left). DREAMWORKS PICTURES

The movie has a credibility problem, and may even be -- as I heard one departing member of the preview audience charge -- "slightly preposterous." Three-star generals don't go to prison for battlefield mistakes. The populations of military prisons are not this honorable, or pliable.

Like Lurie's previous two films, it's also simplistic and somewhat muddled. The characters are one-dimensional, the moral point of the script is fuzzy and it lacks the scope and satisfaction that Redford movies have when he directs them himself.

On the other hand, it works nicely as prison drama, avoiding most of the more obvious and cliched scenes of the genre, and cleverly weaving in elements of -- and paying tribute to -- such classics as Sidney Lumet's "The Hill" and David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

It's also a well-paced, often surprising and consistently compelling action piece. The minor characters are colorfully drawn, Gandolfini makes an effective (and not too hissable) heavy, and the lengthy takeover sequence that fills the last act is expertly staged.

And "The Last Castle" makes a strong star vehicle for Redford. As a lonely, emotionally dysfunctional man of the old school who has nothing to resort to but the old values, he's quietly convincing and musters a wonderful dignity that carries and elevates the movie.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com