Robert Redford's Latest, The Last Castle, Stars Robert Redford in the Robert Redford Role

Robert Redford, star of the new prison picture The Last Castle, has a moral intelligence that's rare in movie stars?yet for the past 20 years, it's been canceled out by movie star vanity. The screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote the scripts to many Redford projects, grimly observed that one of the keys to screenwriting success was remembering to "give the star everything," from the sexy scenes to the big action moments to throwaway lines of dialogue that, in an earlier era, might have been doled out to supporting actors. These days, Redford gets everything. He always got everything?Redford is doubtless one of the inspirations for Goldman's maxim?but now that his big Hollywood projects as an actor don't contain much in the way of complexity, you can't help noticing the greediness; it's front and center, swathed in intelligence and quiet certainty, but obvious nonetheless. He's a radiant beacon of decency and courage, untroubled, for the most part, by anything resembling doubt?a machine-tooled saint, factory sealed for our protection.

Sixties and 70s films like Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, Jeremiah Johnson and All the President's Men gave us complex, exciting Redford heroes who grappled with their own values and the values of a dangerous, contradictory world. Those days are long gone. Since 1984's The Natural, which rewrote Bernard Malamud's stinging novel of American corruption so that its compromised ballplayer hero could hit a game-saving, floodlight-shattering home run, Redford has played a variety of different hero types, but in the end, the character is always Robert Redford™, a prepackaged, craggily handsome commodity whose biggest conflict is that he's reluctant to step off the sidelines and save the world from itself. His safe glamour confuses every issue his star vehicles pretend to raise. Even Indecent Proposal, where Redford played a decadent, Trump-like playboy who entrapped a young wife into whoring herself, glamorized Redford so shamelessly that the whole movie (which was dreadful to begin with) lost any hope of dramatic tension and moral complexity; Redford was so attractive and charming that you couldn't believe his character would do what the script required him to do.

Except for The Horse Whisperer, a nearly three-hour ode to Redford the healing outdoorsman, his films as a director typically avoid the vanity problem by keeping Redford offscreen. Ordinary People, The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show are earnest, intelligent and well-constructed, and they're interested in how moral codes are passed down through families (and institutions)?a crucial subject modern Hollywood avoids. The Last Castle at first seems a compromise between Redford's directorial projects and his unabashed star vehicles. This is the third feature from director Rod Lurie, an ex-film reviewer, West Point graduate and hardcore Hollywood liberal; it's as consumed by politics and ideology as his first two, Deterrence and The Contender. While he isn't credited with the script (David Scarpa and Graham Yost have that dubious honor), the talk certainly feels Lurie-esque. Like a less visceral, more commercial Oliver Stone, this director wants to make crowd-pleasing blockbusters that put very basic human values (courage, tolerance, selflessness, necessary violence) front and center and explore those values via larger-than-life characters and sharp, literate, lifelike banter. That's a worthy goal, and for a while, The Last Castle teases us with the possibility that we're going to see an intelligent mainstream action picture?one that entrances us not just with large-scale action, but with ideas. Early on, as Lurie laid out the setting, characters and themes in swift, simple strokes, I was encouraged by the notion that The Last Castle's brawny, anti-intellectual formula might burn off the Hollywood lefty syrup that caked his otherwise terrific The Contender.

Wrong. Redford's character, Eugene Irwin, a legendary general sent to military prison, arrives at the penitentiary via helicopter in the very first scene, and as soon as he gets the lay of the land, he starts teaching the bedraggled prisoners the history of soldiering and reminding them of how proud they felt saluting the flag. (Most of America feels that pride these days?but seeing it embraced and promoted by murderers and thieves in military prison raises ironic questions the movie isn't interested in answering.) Pretty soon he's acting like another Redford character, Brubaker, sizing up the prison's history of needless institutional violence and deeming it unworthy of a great nation and its great military; from there, it's a short hop to armed revolution, expressed in a clever, intricately staged final battle chock-full of medieval tactics and imagery. Irwin is the white knight leading the peasants to victory over a corrupt, unfeeling king?a namby-pamby warden (James Gandolfini) who has an inferiority complex about never having seen combat and acts out his anxieties by brutalizing the prison population.

But a strong concept is quickly undone by preposterous plot twists and a hero so saintly it's a wonder his followers don't go blind looking at his halo. With his grand sacrifices, faux-mystical Military Guy toughness and tender-voiced lectures, Irwin's a cross between Gandhi, Oliver North and Mr. Rogers. Tom Clancy might think him a bit much. Redford, of course, is great at making these pop culture Christ figures credible; his steely, slightly scornful intelligence always comes through, even in roles that don't deserve to be ennobled by it. You can identify a great movie star by his ability to rivet our attention in a long, wordless closeup; Redford has quite a few closeups like that, and he pulls them off brilliantly. Watching him think is much more exciting than watching him kick ass or inspire people. But he can't be thinking about very much, because aside from Irwin's phony reluctance to be the tough, kind, self-sacrificing hero God apparently minted him to be, there's no suspense in this character's journey. (The word "journey" should probably be in quotes, as should "character.")

The film fakes complexity by having Irwin tell his fellow inmates that, unlike the rest of them, "I know I'm guilty," but the film tactically delays revealing Irwin's sins for a full hour, and once you hear the details, they sound like the sort of sins that would earn a famous general early retirement rather than a prison sentence. And despite the film's lucid, intelligent dialogue ("After 30 years, everyone's a good man," Irwin says ruefully) you're still aware that you're watching a crowd-pleasing action picture about criminals (a la The Longest Yard and The Dirty Dozen and Cool Hand Luke; there's even a variation on the last's famous egg-eating scene) with the usual contradictions and ambiguity scrubbed away. In other words, a dumb movie doing a reasonably good impression of a smart one. Mark Ruffalo, whose star turn in You Can Count on Me was one of last year's most original and engaging performances, is swallowed up by a standard-issue Snitch Seeking Redemption part. Delroy Lindo, who's a couple of performances away from national treasure status, plays Gen. Wheeler, a colleague and superior of Irwin's; he gets one good scene opposite the star, then he's pretty much banished from the movie. As Irwin's daughter, Robin Wright Penn gets one good scene visiting Daddy in the joint, then she, too, disappears. Redford complements and improves every actor who appears alongside him, and the teamwork rescues scene after scene; but because each scene is just one more addition to a rhetorical house of cards, the work is for naught.

To be fair, the intelligent action spectacle has always been a tricky proposition. Even the most honorable attempts have their hypocrisies; Three Kings, for example, was satirical, angry, honest about violence and plugged into recent world politics like few Hollywood adventure pictures, yet it still had its share of jarring, Rambo-style moments, like the bit where Ice Cube brings down an Iraqi helicopter with an explosive football. The Last Castle is riddled with such lapses. Though it draws on a long, fascinating tradition of all-male ensemble action epics and has interesting things to say about the history of war and the military mindset, there's no getting past the fact that it's ultimately another formulaic prison picture in which stoic, earthy, boisterous felons stick it to The Man.

The Man is represented by James Gandolfini, who's been so good for so long that he's starting to enter Gene Hackman country. His character, Col. Winter, is an about-face for an actor whose typecast specialty is animalistic rage. Like other prison movie wardens, Winter is eloquent, detail-obsessed and hopelessly petty and insecure?a bland fascist. But unlike other prison movie wardens, he transcends stereotype. This is partly due to Gandolfini's uncharacteristically pinched, enunciated delivery (he talks like a man who never got over the improbability of a guy like him having gone to college), and it's partly the work of the script. Yost and Scarpa treat Winter not as a one-dimensional monster, but as a weak, flawed, fearful bureaucrat who's stuck in a contest of wills he didn't ask for and isn't equipped to win. Redford's played many JFK-like, butt-kicking superliberals; with his deep insecurity and fathomless resentment of his betters, Gandolfini's Winter is Nixonesque. The characters' juxtaposition reminded me of the famous observation about Kennedy and Nixon: When people looked at Kennedy, they saw who they could be, but when they looked at Nixon, they saw what they were.

At the same time, two contrasting views of history play out in the Irwin-Winter feud. Irwin belongs to the Great Man theory of history, someone who shapes whatever time he's in; Winter, alas, is shaped by his times. In an historic era that forces every American to rise and meet terrifying challenges?including our own Prince Hal, George W. Bush?that contrast lends The Last Castle a resonance it otherwise doesn't deserve.