Castle Falls (2021) Review

“Castle Falls” Theatrical Poster

Director: Dolph Lundgren
Cast: Scott Adkins, Dolph Lundgren, Jim E. Chandler, Dave Halls, Kim DeLonghi, Kevin Wayne, Luke Hawx, Scott Hunter, Ida Lundgren, Bill Billions
Running Time: 87 min.

By Paul Bramhall

There was a moment there when it seemed like 2021 was going to manifest the incomprehensible thought of not delivering a single Scott Adkins movie. However in the closing weeks of the year the British thespian of the DTV action genre came out swinging, first with the continuous take action thriller One Shot, followed up by Castle Falls, which sees him sharing the screen with the Swedish thespian of the DTV genre, Dolph Lundgren, for the fourth time. Adkins’ lack of screen time for much of the year was of course due to the COVID-19 pandemic that the world continued to wrestle with, and Castle Falls was directly impacted when production was shut down after only one day in March 2020. It would be more than 7 months until cameras could start rolling again, with the finished product finally hitting screens in December the following year.

As well as being Adkins’s co-star, Lundgren is also in the director’s chair. After his collaboration with John Woo in 1998’s Blackjack failed to go any further than the feature length pilot, during the 00’s Lundgren took to directing himself in a number of DTV features. Kicking off with 2004’s The Defender and concluding with 2010’s Icarus, Lundgren’s directorial efforts saw him playing an eclectic selection of characters, from bible brandishing bikers (Missionary Man) to terrorist killing drummers (Command Performance). Comparatively his character in Castle Falls is much more strait-laced, playing a prison guard looking after his sick daughter, who’s played by his actual daughter Ida Lundgren (call that taking a leaf out of the Mark Dacascos playbook). Notably she also had a role in Command Performance and hasn’t appeared in anything in-between, so I guess pops was looking to save on the budget.

The plot for Castle Falls sees 2 storylines run in parallel. Lundgren’s prison guard needs $400,000 to secure a life saving operation for his daughter, and when he learns that a gang leader has 3 million dollars stashed in an old hospital building which is due to be destroyed (by Lundgren Construction Services no less), his desperation leads to him attempting to retrieve it. In the other storyline we meet Adkins who plays a washed-up MMA fighter, who after losing his last few matches is no longer a bankable draw, and finds himself relegated to being a sparring partner. Destitute, he drives to Birmingham, Alabama (a choice bizarrely explained by his character hailing from Birmingham in the UK), where he falls into the world of day labourers. Working as part of the demolition crew preparing the old hospital for destruction, it’s Adkins who stumbles across the 3 million by accident, unaware of just how many others are after the stash. 

The others, apart from Lundgren of course, come in the form of the imprisoned gang leaders’ ruthless brother and his gang of lackeys. Played by stuntman Scott Hunter, who comes with an impressive resume having most recently worked on the likes of Red Notice and Black Widow, he not only wants to get his hands on the cash, but also wants to find out who betrayed his brother by giving up the location of the stash. Special mention should go to the pairing of Hunter and Kim DeLonghi (The Last Son, Beyond the Law) who plays his scarred girlfriend. The script by Andrew Knauer, who’s only other claim to fame is scripting Kim Ji-woon’s Hollywood debut The Last Stand, is equal parts clunky and cringey. In one scene DeLonghi tells Hunter “I love it when you’re selfish”, before engaging in a passionate kiss. In another she has to say the line “Sure as eggs is eggs” with a straight face, which she does an amicable job of.

Other less than stellar exchanges see Lundgren bonding with his daughter over the latest hip hop tracks, with Lundgren complaining that he can’t understand what rappers say these days, not like in the Biggie and Tupac days. It’s horrendous stuff, and as a director he fails to inject any sense of pace into proceedings, making the first half of Castle Falls a particular slog to get through. It’s at the 40-minute mark when we get a timer onscreen indicating that the explosives are rigged to go off in 90 minutes, and it finally feels like the narrative is boosted by a sense of urgency. Indeed the single biggest detriment to Castle Falls is that it’s only in the final 30 minutes when it decides to shift gear, and it feels like despite the obviously low budget and ugly digital lensing, there is actually an enjoyable movie in there somewhere.

Adkins and Lundgren have good chemistry together, and while their individual storylines see their characters come across as rather flat and uninspired, when they’re together there’s a kind of cankerous banter between the pair that’s surprisingly funny in a movie that until this point has been deadly serious. It’s a shame then that they only meet each other in the last reel, as had they shared the screen together much earlier I get the distinct feeling that Castle Falls would be much more enjoyable than it actually is. One thing Lundgren does get right is to bring in fight choreographer Tim Man to deliver on the action front. Castle Falls marks the ninth time for Man to choreograph Adkins, having first worked together on 2013’s Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, marking one of modern action cinemas most enduring relationships between performer and choreographer.

Once the final 30 minutes kicks in Lundgren wisely keeps the action beats coming, and even allows the opportunity for an Ivan Drago versus Yuri Boyka face off as the pair briefly come to blows (a fight in which my biggest takeaway was that Lundgren seemed to be wearing indestructible glasses). Most of the heavy lifting goes to Adkins as he gets into a series of scuffles with Hunter’s crew, even throwing in his trademark flying spin kick at one point. However there’s a distinct feeling that this is Adkins and Man on plug ‘n’ play fight duty, with none of the fights offering up anything we haven’t seen before, and no real ‘wow’ factor or moments of inspired choreography like we got in the pair’s collaborations under director Jesse V. Johnson. While the answer is probably an obvious one – time constraints – it still doesn’t necessarily make what’s onscreen anymore impressive. 

The soundtrack also tends to be intrusive, distracting from the action rather than complimenting it, with a choice of either throbbing distorted electric guitar riffs, or oddly composed synthesiser beats which sound like a long-lost cousin of an 80’s HK action flick. The worst offender is the decision to have a downbeat grungy metal track play over the opening fight which pits Adkins against stuntman Evan Dane Taylor (fight choreographer on the 2017 The Punisher series) in a gym. The right choice of music could have drawn attention away from the lifeless color grading the scene suffers from, and instead assisted to elevate the tension, but instead it only serves to lumber Castle Falls with a completely underwhelming opening scene. We get that Lundgren likes his rock tracks (I didn’t fall for the Biggie and Tupac conversation for a second), but here it rarely felt like the soundtrack was matching whatever scene it was being applied to.

At the end of the day Castle Falls succeeds in being a watchable DTV flick but nothing more, and is unlikely to be remembered a few hours after the end credits have rolled. Lundgren hasn’t been in the director’s chair since 2010, which is long enough to get rusty, especially if you were never a particularly strong director in the first place. The biggest shame here is that Lundgren and Adkins share a chemistry reminiscent of Adkins and Louis Mandylor in The Debt Collector flicks, and had Castle Falls leveraged this more, it could well have been enough to compensate for the budget constraints and generic action beats. As it is, the best part of an hour passes before we get a glimpse of what could have been, and for all but the most hardcore Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins fans, that may feel like a little too late. They wouldn’t be wrong.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10