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"The Last Castle"
(Reviewed October 16, 2001)
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This tiresome mess of cliche plotting and utterly phony characters is from the same patronizing fathead director (Rod Lurie) who foisted the condescendingly stupid "The Contender" on movie audiences last year. Where that movie was a sickening Hollywood-liberal handjob for the insufferably smug liar and sexual predator Bill Clinton, this film is a hosanna of sorts for the delusional grandstanding fatuous demagogue John McCain, the Democrat who calls himself a Republican. ("The Contender"'s main character was a senator who would not stoop to address issues of sexual impropriety, while "The Last Castle" gives us Robert Redford as a former Vietnam POW who refused an offer to be released from the "Hanoi Hilton" because he wanted to stay with his fellow prisoners.)
Redford's character is a three-star Army general who has been sent to a US military prison for reasons that are left a mystery (to us and to his fellow inmates) until more than midway through the movie. We are expected to believe that no one in a military prison--a military prison, I repeat--would know what Redford is in for until prison warden James Gandolfini makes a public announcement...as if a crime that would send a three-star general to the clink would not be front-page news all over the country. Hoo-boy.
Redford gathers up the usual stock characters found in any bad war movie--the amiable lunkhead, the doc, the badass, and the rat-with-goodness-inside-that's-dying-to-get-out--and arranges to take over the prison from the sadistic warden, who has a big collection of war memorabilia but who never has seen combat. (His second-ratedness is driven home with all the subtlety of a blow on the head when the camera shows us that he listens to record albums featuring music composed by Salieri, Mozart's envious and incompetent rival.)
The final showdown is as jaw-droppingly preposterous as something from "Hogan's Heroes." When the cons wheel out a friggin' 20-foot-tall catapult that they somehow have managed to construct and hide from the guards, you won't know whether to spit or throw something.
This is the sort of movie that is so uninvolving and fake, you realize that you would not sit through five minutes of it if you found it while playing dial-scan at home.
Also, it definitely is "the wrong movie for the times," as they say. Is anyone in America right now in the mood for a movie about a bloody, violent prison uprising that involves disgraced US soldiers attacking and killing US prison guards? What's next, a loving biography of Osama's early years?
Back Row Grade: F
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