Castle Falls
SHOUT FACTORYIrvine Welsh once wrote that a good life leads to a good death, and try as directors might to apply that to characters of the action genre, few can pull together the necessary claims needed. For an audience to engage with a lead, they must be both entertaining and emotionally available. Castle Falls does not offer that. Granted, it is a problem of the genre and where it is headed rather than the cast assembled here, but the active repulsion to characters with layered storytelling is an active choice from director and star Dolph Lundgren. Fair it is to say the man knows action when he makes it, but the glory days are far behind him, and what ended those was that failure to bring drama to action.
Instead, Castle Falls flails around uncomfortably trying to market itself to those that still enjoy a Steven Seagal feature. Lundgren fails to accept that a director of the lowly budget-action flick that sends itself straight to video-on-demand must either engage with a particular brand of cheesy and explosive action or renege on that and instead infiltrate the dramatic choices that would surely affect characters written more personably. Having both is a delicate matter, having neither is an acceptance of failure before ever getting started. To his credit, Lundgren and co-star Scott Adkins try and perform dramatics without detail and action without activity.
An active choice that is, though, to have the fistfights and shootouts feel incredibly quiet. Abandoned rooftops and firefights do mark the stakes as relatively high, and while Castle Falls has fine enough direction for these scenes, they are few and far between. Thankfully so. A lack of bombastic music cues, a sense of urgency and flair make the action throughout as weak as the premise, which sees generic fights over cash and mobsters going at one another with all the strength expected of a dispassionate action flick. Prisons, naturally, feature. The silencing of bad men who perform worse actions to evil people. The cycle continues, on and on it goes, until an inevitable fade to black where generic rock riffs rally whoever in the audience is left. Lundgren and Adkins are competent, but their star power has faded far, far away from where it was. If they were in their prime, they could have carried Castle Falls beyond the finish line.
Castle Falls is bold enough to start as it means to go on. A wooden fight in an almost silent room that sees Lundgren stretch no further than the talent found in that of a clunky videogame. The freezeframe, the few seconds that cut to black for no particular reason and the placard that introduces audiences to Mike (Adkins), which is seemingly a flashback to the same room just a few moments ago, is fascinatingly dense. Lundgren has not thought this through, the usual qualms of friends falling out for business reasons, however vague they may be. Those are the reasons that push Adkins, whose performance is limited but acceptable throughout Castle Falls. Frail action and dull set pieces are not worth wading through to see Adkins try and clamour back some of his heyday work.