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88It's an even rarer pleasure to see a film that combines exciting action with a smart, well-informed script and vivid yet restrained performances.
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75It could have been more, could have been a triumph and a classic, instead of simply an effective entertainment.
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75Not as simple as it looks, though its appeal is simple: Robert Redford goes to prison, and James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") is the warden. That's a movie worth seeing right there.
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75The kind of movie you can enjoy easily enough, as long as you don't think about it much.
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75Like Lurie's previous two films, it's also simplistic and somewhat muddled.
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70Lurie manages, despite these obstacles, to inspire Redford to give one of the most layered and interesting performances of his career.
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Engrossing if standard-issue prison drama.
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63An outrageously unlikely prison action movie made with lots of eye-catching pizzazz and undeserved expertise.
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63If this melodrama has that haven't-we-met-before look, it's because it combines elements of "The Caine Mutiny" (Gandolfini's Winter is Queeg-like) with those of "Stalag 17."
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60It's good enough, smart enough, and people will like it. It's also a high-concept cop-out, a convention-strangled genre movie that never zigs when your every instinct is screaming that it's about to zag.
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60A disappointingly pedestrian prison meller that falls between stools artistically and politically.
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58This is, after all, not just Robert Redford. It's Redford in the nobly burnished self-mythologic perfection of his late-middle-aged golden god-ness.
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50Often feels choppy, as if chunks of connecting narrative had been lopped off in the editing room.
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50They may call it The Last Castle, but moviegoers will ultimately feel rooked.
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50While the film is shot in shades of gray, the drama is played out in black and white.
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50The movie is exuberant, strapping and obvious -- a problem drama suffering from a steroid overdose.
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40All crass in its empty bluster and bogus uplift.
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40Ruffalo, actually, who was so perfect in the little-seen "You Can Count On Me," is the only real reason to sit through The Last Castle.
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40It's not objectionable (which is saying something these days) but neither does it have any compelling reason to be seen.
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40This is an odd and ultimately dispiriting film, despite some intriguing ideas about brute force vs. moral authority, the elaborately staged uprising -- and impressive actors in the cast. That is to say, they've been impressive elsewhere.
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40Although the movie has a few interesting twists and turns, its mind-versus-mind conceit devolves into a mundane warden-versus-inmate conclusion.
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40Robert Redford does everything but wear a crown of thorns as the selfless war hero of The Last Castle, a heavy-handed military prison melodrama.
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40(Lurie's) a shameless, if skilled, manipulator of easy emotions. (29 Oct 2001, p. 93)
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38I don't know why Redford and the white-hot Gandolfini signed on for this fiasco, but the give-and-take between them is the film's sole pleasure.
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38It's a mishmash of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "From Here to Eternity" and "The Great Escape," with everything complex and entertaining siphoned off.
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33Miscast, clumsily staged and ideologically wobbly.
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30Deadly dull.
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30A melodrama in which the clichés prove more lethal than the bullets.
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30Redford underacts, Gandolfini overacts, and this movie is directed with the same air of unreality, the same grim passion for cliches, both cinematic and emotional, that Lurie brought to his first film, "The Contender."
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30Lurie's politics aside, it's astonishing that a man who once reviewed films keeps churning out movies full of cinema's most hollow clichés; indeed, he turns out stuff that's even more disjointed and improbable than the most mediocre fare.
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20Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.
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20Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 14 out of 16
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Mixed: 0 out of 16
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Negative: 2 out of 16
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SamJ.10