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The
Last Castle
was a good movie…until it got stupid. Then it was a
stupid movie… until it got pillow-fartingly ridiculous.
A
military prison. Warden: Tony Soprano. [Anyone who writes
to me, explaining the distinction between an actor's character
name and his real name will get a reply explaining the distinction
between hebetude and tongue-in-cheek.] New inmate: highly
respected and profusely-decorated 3-star general Robert
Redford. Theme: Battle Theorist (Tony, who sports a collection
of battle memorabilia, weapons, literature) versus Battle
Veteran (Redford, whose field credits include the Gulf and
other recent political coups which I pay no attention to).
Premise: new inmate Redford takes a dislike to the way Warden
Tony disses his marine and army peeps behind bars, so decides
to launch a revolt, the prisoners rallying behind him due
to his iron-fisted reputation and rakish good looks.
Let
the farce begin.
Redford
starts slowly, employing the tactic of Keeping To Himself
and letting the screenwriter make the requisite character
stereotypes come to him: there's Aguilar, the dim bulb;
Yates, the amoral prison bookie; there's the fallen-from-grace
doctor, the big black guy, the big white guy, the big guy
of uncertain ethnic descent and the token Latino guy. Redford
coaxes The Patriot from this ragtag band of uncertain heroes,
twisting Tony's panties into cat's cradles in the process.
Saluting
is not allowed amongst inmates in a military prison - something
to do with loss of rank and lack of hairspray. But Redford's
clichéd one-liners evokes inmate-saluting soon enough,
causing big trouble in Little Italy. This in turn leads
to Redford's punishment: to bare his virile, octogenarian
man-torso (we're talkin' carpet-chest that makes Paul Stanley's
look like a well-tended bowling green) and to move a pile
of rocks from here to there, all day and night. With his
blond ambition and undeniable desirability to prison men
of all persuasions, Redford turns this punishment into yet
another spectacle with which to win over the tender hearts
of his fellow crims.
Redford
also redefines self-esteem for prisoners: Aguilar stammers
the series of events that got him arrested, which involved
… "being a Marine fer four years and-and-and I
made a mistake fer fuh-fuh-five miniss and I'm in here…"
(The 'mistake' was bashing in an officer's head.) Redford's
expert assessment? "You were a Marine for four years
and your mistake lasted just five minutes? Well, I guess
that still makes you 95% Marine." A regular Tony Robbins
for Jailbirds.
By
this criteria, we can safely say that the postal worker
who spends twenty years behind a semi-attended counter,
saying, "Do you want stamps with that?" and then
spends ten minutes atop a rooftop sniping is still [salute]
95% All-Amuuurican Government Postal Worker. And the priest
who devotes fifty years to his parish who is discovered
with his bad habit billowing around the buttocks of a schoolboy
is - by Redford's Law - still [genuflect] 95% Man-Priest.
All praise the Ape-Law of Robert Redford: thank goodness
that incident with the duck butter and the power drill only
took up four minutes of my life; I can hold my head up proud
- I'm still 95% All-American Woman…
All
the philosophy, chess-playing and tough love comes from
the convicted criminal in this film - Redford - so the viewer
is cajoled into rooting for the wrong side. The attempts
at tear-jerking and patriotism and brotherhood are completely
misplaced by the fact that this bake sale is held - in a
JAIL. And these 'good' guys… are in fact, the bad
guys - they're prisoners! When was the last time
you supported a prison revolt, replete with murder and destruction
of taxpayer property, cheering on the cons in their noble
cause to usurp authority and kill aimlessly? …no, I
didn't think so.
Delroy
Lindo (who six years ago played a gangster, with Tony as
his bearish underling, suffering humiliating ass-kickings
at the hands of the stoutish John Travolta in Get Shorty)
has now scored the B-role in this movie, time having turned
these two actor's fortunes around. Lindo is a General who
is brought in by Tony, to talk sense to Redford, whose plotting
and scheming ways are making Tony wonder whether he shouldn't
have just stayed in Jersey, overseeing The Bing with Sylvio.
For
we who came to see Tony Soprano bust a move other than his
usual gansta rap, we were not prepared for the impotent
swab his warden character turned out to be - even as a "character
actor playing against type", Tony was reined in to
such an extent that even when the situation warranted explosive
retaliation during the siege, he simply sulked about his
crumbling office in a hissy rage, waiting for the prisoners
to stop with their flinging rocks and running around burning
things.
Redford
conspires to use Tony's own armaments against him; the water-cannon,
the helicopter, the giant home-made slingshot (the wha-?
This last weapon, the trebuchet, turned up out of nowhere,
like Monty Python's Trojan Rabbit, when the plot had degenerated
to guys running around and burning things aimlessly, and
the director thought no one would notice the appearance
of a construct that literally could not be hidden anywhere
on prison grounds - The Great Escape this ain't!).
Checkmate is to capture the warden's American flag and fly
it upside down, which denotes a distress signal - a concept
which they make abundantly clear through the dialog of about
twenty people. Yeh, okay - I heard you the SEVENTH time
- so if the American flag winds up flying upside down -
relax! - nobody's a terrorist or anti-American - sheesh!
To
cap this farce with the seal of disbelief, these prisoners
don't even want to escape - they just want another warden,
and are willing to undergo fatal, non-sequitur combat to
force the authorities to overhaul that command position.
I got news for you, guys: the warden may change, but the
Job Description remains the same, i.e. it's any warden's
duty to retain your low self-esteem, disorientation and
dissension amongst yourselves and to KEEP YOU IN JAIL. [Any
readers who believe that jail is to reform criminals should
still be putting teeth under their pillow and waiting for
25c to magically appear.] Changing the management amounts
to nothing more than amending the names on the office doors
and letterheads. Of all people, you military perps should
understand that in contravening The System's laws, you yourselves
have empowered The System to isolate you from it. You committed
yourselves to protecting this System - and now you want
to complain about the System you've been defending all these
years? Yeh, jail sucks - it's meant to!
[The
real prison system is, in fact, imperfect to a fault, and
does more long-term harm than good, for a number of different
reasons - but that's another tale, best told when I'm drunk,
naked and in handcuffs (I do my best work that way).]
Warden
Tony was not portrayed as being inordinately cruel. Any
acts of violence he perpetrated were enacted upon prisoners
who were disobeying orders. Let's look at the facts - firstly:
they're prisoners! A prison is not a democracy (at
least - not the last time I was in one). Since when do we
grant prisoners the expertise to diagnose anti-social or
psychotic behavior in a warden? And if they don't like the
way the jail is run, since when do they have the inalienable
right to overthrow it?
The
Last Castle's release date was originally slated for
Oct 12th, 2001 and the original poster featured a muted-color
American flag flying upside down atop a pile of rubble.
The original slogan was: "No castle can have two kings".
This sombre ad campaign anticipated an intriguing, powerful
movie… Then - the World Trade Center fell down and
- as much as the word "coward" was bandied about
in relation to the Taliban - suddenly every full-blooded,
flag-waving, quiche-nibbling American started displaying
their cowardice by leaching all political incorrectness
from their society. For all the media that childishly depicts
Taliban fear of the war-wakened America, it is, ironically,
America who is paying lip-service to unity and democracy
and then fearfully falling back on the age-old ploy of suppressing
anything that could possibly be construed as free speech.
This movie's backpedaling ad campaign was one such example.
Not only was the release date put back, the Flag poster
was immediately replaced by one which featured the starring
actors' faces over a battle scene.
Can
anyone really apprehend the motivations behind the revamped
marketing campaign? Why was the slogan changed to "A
castle can only have one king" - because the "two
kings" reference might remind people that "two
towers" existed? Oh, heaven forfend!… You might
accuse me of nitpicking irrationally - welcome to the idiot
mind of the Consumer Market Analysis Specialist (read as:
Mediocrity Yes-Man). …And was the release date set
back so that the sycophantic film-makers could tack on "patriotic"
scenes and a dumb ending to add to the general mortifying
embarrassment of the whole affair? Probably…
In
the final confrontation scene, Redford flashbacks to his
Sundance Kid days, as a veritable army trains their rifles
on him from the ramparts of the rec yard, waiting for the
word from Don Soprano to bake his ziti. Tucked under
his arm, Redford carries the folded flag stolen from Tony's
office, and word on the street was that he was gonna raise
that puppy upside down, thereby broadcasting Tony's incompetence
to the Five Families. The grounds are decimated, the surveillance
towers are razed, as is Tony's office overlooking the yard,
guards and prisoners have been killed, the water-cannon
is nuts & bolts, the helicopter is toast. (Guys, guys
- was it really worth all this effort just for a new warden?
At least throw in an escape attempt and I'll understand
your fervor; but even if a new warden comes in today, you've
still got to go back and sleep in your same old beds, except
now they've been burned and urinated upon - well done!…
you DOIKS!)
…
And Tony faces Redford, staunchly: "Give me back my
flag!"
Redford:
"It's not 'your' flag." Ouch! - now that was so
patriotic, it made my thighs supple. As the whole prison
watches, he turns, walks to the flagpole resolutely (as
Tony is screaming into his comm to shoot him down no matter
how impressive his senior-citizen man-torso was) and starts
raising the flag. Of course, that carpet-chest affected
more than just myself and the other men in the theatre -
it also affected each trained sharpshooter rifleman who
surrounded Redford that day, and whose dreams were now rife
with frolicking in that snowy-white chest-jungle with the
blue-eyed avenger-general who defied a mob boss. They lower
their weapons - and it is up to the only sane person in
the jail to shoot down Boy Redford, in the back - Tony Soprano!
Of course, he is arrested immediately by his captain; something
to do with The Law - The Law which they suddenly want to
adhere to, after not giving it a moment's thought during
the last hour's siege.
…And
the camera pans up the flagpole and - the flag is flying,
proud and true - RIGHT SIDE UP. And the convicts salute
it. And the guards salute it. And the music swells, as Redford
dies with a wry smile, flag fluttering in battle-smoke breeze,
cheese glutting all Exit doors…
I
cried. I cried because I had spent eight bucks on this movie,
which could have been spent on an ox-tail dinner at Versailles;
I cried for the $1.30 amount of gas it took to get to the
theatre, which could have been spent driving aimlessly along
Santa Monica Boulevard trying to hit the ugly transvestites
[the good-looking ones; that's another tale, best told when
I'm in disguise as Hugh Grant]; I cried for the fact that
Scott Bakula was not in this movie; I cried for the three
hours of my life now gone - time which could have been better
spent lying on my sofa in a coma.
Yet,
there were some things I was thankful for: I was thankful
that only one helicopter blew up, unlike any given John
Woo film where seven or eight usually go up during the first
act; I was thankful that Redford didn't take off his
pants as well; I was thankful that no one recognized
me in the theatre; but mostly thankful that Scott Bakula
wasn't in this movie. Mostly.
Probably
the best advice one could offer to someone comtemplating
viewing this movie - Fuggedaboudit!
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