Reception
The film received mixed reviews, in which it has scored a 52% rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 113 reviews. 59 of these are positive and 54 negative, with an average rating of 5.6/10 and the consensus: "The Last Castle is well acted and rousing for the most part, but the story cannot stand up to close scrutiny." At Metacritic, a rating website which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 42/100, based on 32 reviews.
Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle criticized the cast, describing Redford as "no George C. Scott" and Gandolfini as the wrong choice to play an icy intellectual. LaSalle concluded that it was a "naive film about a great leader's capacity to inspire."
Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times saw it as "a dramatic, involving story" but criticized its "loopholes and lapses." Ebert noted that Irwin is no less evil than Winter and that they both "delight in manipulating those they can control." He pointed out that the film fails to portray how the prisoners manufacture the weapons and hide them under Winter's observation.
It received 3 out of 5 stars on IGN; the review noted that though a well paced and well acted film, it "suffers from this overall militaristic, streamlined approach."
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said the film's "pretensions lead to a slow, even stately pace, what should be crackling confrontations between Irwin and Winter end up playing more like a tea party than a Wagnerian battle of wills."
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the movie a "C-plus" grade, writing: "As staged by Lurie, the drama has all the subtlety and surprise of a showdown between the sissy-bully son of Captain Queeg and a hero who's like a fusion of Brubaker, Spartacus, and Norma Rae."
Variety wrote: "Much of the potential dramatic juice has been drained out of The Last Castle, a disappointingly pedestrian prison meller that falls between stools artistically and politically."
Claudia Puig of USA Today criticized the writing, citing "a losing battle with an implausible script."
Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times wrote: "The movie is exuberant, strapping and obvious—a problem drama suffering from a steroid overdose."
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