The Last Castle

I wasn't sure what to expect when the wife picked this. The description on Paramount+ hit only the broadest of strokes, touching on the rebellion that happens in the movie's third act, but presenting it as if it's the entire movie. What The Last Castle really is is a dollar store synthesis of A Few Good Men and The Shawshank Redemption, played with the unmistakable desire to get the Academy's attention in the worst way. The Last Castle is about a contest of wills between a jailed former general (Robert Redford) and the dictatorial commanding officer of the military prison he's been sent to (James Gandolfini). The two clash, and that clash eventually leads to a coordinated riot in an effort to get Gandolfini's character ousted from command. Fine and dandy. The Last Castle's two biggest problems are how it shows its inspirations, and how it undercuts its actors. The first of those two is almost comically bad. Every speech is dripping with forced profundity about the indomitable will of the human spirit, about duty and honor and what makes a soldier, and about how, as Redford puts it, the five seconds a man was at his worst don't counter-balance the rest of his life when a man was at his best. It's a miracle this movie doesn't have a graphic saying "CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE PATRIOT" in the lower third at all times. It's a classic case of show versus tell; The Last Castle needs Redford to give sermons on the mountain to his fellow prisoners so the audience knows how to feel, where Shawshank just has Andy Dufresne BE the shining light and refuse to be held down. The Last Castle wants to be inspiring, but it doesn't know how to make you feel it, so it just tells you to feel it. It works as well as you think it does. But that's nothing compared to how Redford and Gandolfini are done dirty in this by the direction. Actors can only do so much when the director tells them to act a certain way, and it's clear director Rod Lurie wanted this to be a certain kind of movie and directed it that way, and that was to have Redford and Gandolfini be, at all times, chill. Gandolfini gets in some smug smirks (almost always at the wrong time), but neither raise their voice above that of a preschool teacher. Neither show anger or sadness or frustration or pride or anything above the average emotional temperature. I only know their characters are emotionally invested in the situation because the movie tells me as much, but the characters themselves never show it. Why should I care about Redford's crusade to topple this tyrannical regime when he has the same "dem's the breaks" dismissive attitude about everything from corporal punishment as his own daughter dismissing him to watching a fight in the yard over a basketball? If he can't be shown to give a damn, why should I? It's fun seeing the plan come together in the third act, even if it asks the viewer to swallow a LOT of conveniences and contrivances, like having the material to construct whole damned trebuchet (or a military history expert like Gandolfini's character not knowing what a trebuchet is on sight). And it's not like the two leads, or Mark Ruffalo in an early supporting role, are bad. They're still eminently watchable. But this could've been so much more, and the direction, in multiple ways, makes The Last Castle the lamest version it could be.