Gran Torino (2008)

I don't know what has happened to Clint Eastwood. Perhaps I am misremembering the subtleties and surprises, visually and emotionally, in films like Play Misty For Me, High Plains Drifter, Heartbreak Ridge and Bird. Because lately, Clint Eastwood -- the director -- has been responsible for some horrible, overly sentimental, heavy-handed storytelling. Million Dollar Baby did it, Mystic River, and now this. It's just not the Clint I remember.


Gran Torino's main conceit is that of a crotchety old Korean war vet finding friendship with a group of Chinese people living next door to him. A young man, Tao, gets in trouble with the local toughs and old man Clint saves the day, thus becoming a hero to the mostly foreign neighbourhood. He resist at first until he begins to enjoy the company of Tao and his sister.

But, because Clint can't keep the "gook" and "chink" defamations to a minimum, even around his new friends, things go wrong, and Clint inadventently starts a neighbourhood war between the gangs and the nice families with himself in the middle.

And from there, everything goes exactly as you might expect. Everything you think will happen does happen, and every possible secret hidden behind Clint's world weary eyes turn out to be not very secret at all, and are, in fact, the subject of just about every cranky-war-vet-made-good film (of which their are skads).

This one is one of the worst, with obvious plotting, melodramatic scoring (the sound of military drums every time Clint goes off to do some racial taunting is especially cringe-inducing), and overwrought imagery (the Christ-pose at the end was the final nail in the movie's rotting coffin for me).

I just ended up resenting everything about it. It was a great idea just plundered by Clint's apparently new-found desire to shove his themes down out throats rather than subtly, visually allowing us to figure it all out for ourselves.

Just terrible.