How does one judge a bad film that entertains immensely? Is it still a bad film or does the fact that it was so entertaining raise to another level? Is a guilty pleasure a good movie or simply a bad one you still like? These are the kinds of questions Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino raises, a film with some glaringly obvious flaws that should have destroyed it, yet instead made the film all the more endearing.I make no bones about it, I really enjoy Clint Eastwood films, both when he's doing the acting and when he's doing the directing. Changeling, from earlier this year, was a major misstep in my opinion, and Flags of Our Fathers was hit or miss, but everything else he's done for a long while has really pleased me. Each of those films had their flaws, however, and there's no denying it. Here Eastwood presents us with what is purported to be his acting swan song, and it feels like an ode to his classic Dirty Harry character if the guy had grown old and alienated everyone he knew. We've been getting a lot of these deconstructionist reimaginings of classic characters lately, notably with a double whammy from Sylvester Stallone, but that streak really started with Eastwood's Unforgiven back in 1992. It worked perfectly there, not so much here.
I think the two biggest flaws here are the horrible acting and the simplified story. Aside from Eastwood, everyone is a newcomer. Eastwood went out and found regular Hmong folks to be in his movie, and while it makes it feel a bit more authentic, it is at times unbearable listening to the constant forced line deliveries. Granted, there isn't exactly a huge repository of young seasoned Asian actors out there, so it's nice that Eastwood was trying to expand the selection, so to speak. On top of that, Eastwood himself gives an occasionally groan worthy performance, literally growling half his lines. As much as I enjoy Eastwood, it's clear that if he's nominated for an Oscar for this it's only because the Academy loves him as a person so much.
The story is the other problem. Eastwood plays Walt, a retied widower living in a neighborhood increasingly filled with minorities. This doesn't please him one bit. Yet after an altercation on his front lawn, he gets to know his neighbors and realizes he has more in common with them than with his own family. It builds to a showdown between Eastwood and a local gang that have been harassing his neighbors. If you go in expecting a Dirty Harry movie, you'll be surprised by the outcome. If you go in expecting a deconstruction of a Dirty Harry movie, you won't be. Either way, the ending is fairly satisfying, though a bit unlikely. The problem is how simplified everything is. In Eastwood's world things are either black or white, never gray. His family is unrepentantly unlikable, his neighbors are all saints, the gang members are purely evil. Unforgiven seemed to find a nice middle ground for its characters, but that has been abandoned here.
And yet... I can't help but admit that I was entertained throughout. It's a lot of goofy fun. On some level I think Eastwood intended it that way, but on another I think he took a lot of this very seriously, which makes it all the more amusing. At the heart of it all is Walt, such a strange and verbally abusive character that you laugh both at and with. What, for example, are we to make of his repeated threats using his hand to mimic a gun? If an 80 year old man walked up to a corner boy and did that, they'd laugh him off. Hell, even Dirty Harry would have trouble making that gesture genuinely frightening. Is Walt aware of that? Does he even care?
This is not the highbrow Eastwood of recent years, whether it is aspiring to be that or not. What it is, though, is a genuinely amusing, if sometimes gratingly silly film. It's always a welcome pleasure to see Eastwood back on the screen, and while this isn't quite the fitting swan song I'd like it to be, it is an amusing deconstructive coda to a string of tough guy roles.
