Robert Redford returns to Brubaker mode as a prison reformer, only this time it's a military prison and he himself is a prisoner, a much-decorated general, former Vietnam POW, author of the biblical Burden of Command, and a man of such loyalty and integrity that he opted not to fight the charges against him. But then the sadistic commandant (James Gandolfini), an armchair soldier with a sinister taste for classical music (what kind of man is this?), awakens the revolutionist in him. The photography is a uniform drab gray-green, so dark as to obscure the faces. (One solution to the problem of Redford's wrinkles.) But only total nonvisibility, or invisibility, could account for the prisoners' ability to prepare for their uprising. (How did that thirty-foot-tall trebuchet escape detection in the yard?) Director Rod Lurie, catering to the viewer whose hunger for inspiration outgrowls his hunger for truth, clarifies here what was evident already in The Contender: that the leanness and modesty of Deterrence, his debut, were out of necessity and not out of choice. And any hope that a former film critic might be able to teach a lesson or two has been beaten down beneath simple sermonizing. With Mark Ruffalo and Robin Wright Penn. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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