FORTRESS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This extremely formulaic prison film
set in the 21st century will be more at home on cable than a
Flying Wallenda. Stuart Gordon's future prison looks like it
is from the 21st Century, but the story feels like it is out
of the 1950s--the low end of the 1950s. Gordon is good at
mixing dark humor and horror, but you couldn't prove it by
this tired exercise in Sci-Fi (as opposed to science
fiction). Rating: high -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
I went with friends to see this one. They had coupons. It was a dollar to get into the movie and twenty-five cents for popcorn. My friend Dale got the popcorn. When the film was over I told Dale I hoped he had gotten a dollar's worth of popcorn because he hadn't gotten twenty-five cents' worth of film.
Okay, that is a bit of an overstatement. But certainly this was a film that is better to have seen than it was to be seeing it. There was a breed of science fiction writing called "space opera" because it was really just a bad Western or "horse opera" translated to a science fiction story just by making substitutions. FORTRESS is not really a science fiction film at all but a bad prison film thinly disguised as science fiction because it takes place in the future. The plot is one long string of prison film cliches. We have the good guy who is sentenced to prison unfairly for breaking an unjust law. He is threatened and abused by the sadistic prison warden while the tough prisoners want make hamburger out of him. The toughs try beating up on him and can't. Meanwhile he wins the hearts and minds of all the prisoners but the toughest con and he proves he has guts by taking a punishment intended for a weaker friend. But he still has to prove he is the top of the pecking order by fighting the biggest and meanest of the prisoners. By the skin of his teeth he beats up the tough and has him in his power, but... surprise... he shows mercy. And on and on ad nauseum. This is a plot built of one cliche after another. Except it doesn't take place in some jerkwater prison in the present, it takes place in Tomorrow. In this future the ZPG folks AND the pro-life folks have both gotten their way. The law in "one woman, one pregnancy." Our hero tried to have a second baby after their first baby died. So into the clinker husband and wife go. The prison is privately owned by sadists who somehow can run this ultra-modern electronic prison on the $26/day/inmate they get from the state. This prison may be uncomfortable, but it sure is fancy, and how they run it on $26/day/inmate is beyond explaining.
Christopher Lambert did a decent job as Tarzan in GREYSTOKE. That is mostly because there seems to be something strange about him that is hard to put a finger on and there would be with Tarzan also. But generally he just is not a very good actor. In this film his acting seems particularly wooden as he plays John Brennick, the lone wolf standing up against a society gone wrong. Loryn Locklin plays Brennick's beautiful blond wife, loved by Brennick and lusted after by the nasty warden. She is bland but she can speak her lines and does not bump into the furniture. Kurtwood Smith who seems to be making a career of playing stern villains (like the unsympathetic father in DEAD POETS SOCIETY) here plays the prison warden. As it turns out there is a little more to him than meets the eye at first, but nothing that is very interesting. Still admittedly he is a better actor than either Lambert or Locklin. Lincoln Kilpatrick--trying hard to be Morgan Freeman and nearly succeeding--plays a wise old inmate.
Stuart Gordon who is better known for horror directs, but the drab prison motif robs this film of the black humor that his REANIMATOR films and his PIT AND THE PENDULUM had. About the only aspect of this film that is above rather than beneath expectation is the art direction and set design. The prison really has a decent look. I just wish a better story was written to take advantage of the look. My rating for this is a high -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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