Do you remember those childhood days when you were grounded, but you would attempt to escape "the prison?"
The quiet tip-toeing out your door, hiding behind pillars and furniture, and the look on dad's face when he got 3 inches of steel blade plunged deep into the red recesses of his vital organs. Now who's grounded, huh old man?!
Somebody at DreamWorks has similar memories, and has crystallized them in The Last Castle. The movie opens with the arrival of three-star General Irwin (Robert Redford) at a maximum-security military prison, sentenced for defying a command of the President. He is introduced to the warden, Colonel Winter (James Gandolfini), and there is a bit of confusion over which one should do the saluting.
From there, the entire action of the movie is propelled by the conflict between these two characters. No sidelines, no deeper meaning, just a good ol' fashioned head-butting redemption film.
Irwin hears that Colonel Winter has been behind several "accidental" deaths at the prison, secretly ordering the guards to take head shots with their rubber bullets. Irwin tries to dismiss the accounts so he can just ride out his time, but eventually camaraderie gets the better of him.
His fellow prisoners begin saluting him, and when that is prohibited they slick their hair back in place of saluting whenever he passes. They also come up with secret names (Chief, Buddy etc.) to reinstate the status that each prisoner had held in the military. When another prisoner is killed, Irwin tells Winter to resign or he is going to take over the prison.
So Irwin has his army, and Winter has his guards. What ensues is a mental and physical battle between the two forces to see who really controls the prison grounds.
Gandolfini once again shakes off his Tony Soprano aura and delivers a fantastic performance. The beauty of his character lies in how easy it is to side with him.
"In Winter's mind, he's doing the right thing," Gandolfini explained in a press release. "His prison is very secure, his guards are safe and the prisoners don't like him. I don't think you can read him all that easily."
The ambiguity in his character plays well on screen, and runs the risk of making the adversary too agreeable. A few prisoners died under his watch, but as he pointed out, the earlier problems with escape and attacks on guards had been eliminated.
While there have been a ton of movies on jailbreaks, this is the first to my knowledge that shows the prisoners trying to take control from the inside in order to oust a warden. It's a novel idea, it comes together well and the only lapse comes in the scenes before the final battle. Namely, that there weren't enough of them.
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I want to know how prisoners managed to build a 30-foot catapult, and at what point they came in contact with large quantities of gasoline and glass bottles. If you aren't going to give explanations for these things, you might as well just furnish all the prisoners with grenade launchers and let the audiences' imagination work it out.
Director Rod Lurie breaks new ground with this picture, and even if you hate the story, the final battle will make up for its abundance of predictability. The Last Castle opens this Friday at theatres everywhere.
