Clint Eastwood re-emerges from retirement for one last drug run in The Mule
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In the 10 years since Clint Eastwood last starred in one of his own films, the de facto movie-star farewell Gran Torino, he’s embarked upon one of the most adventurous, experimental, and prolific periods of his directing career. (He also made another, less effective movie-star farewell, directed by his longtime producer and assistant director.) Unfortunately, this period has also produced some of his weakest movies, a first-take tour through both recent and mid-20th-century American history that often feels like an absentminded version of his best work. This unevenness might have to do with his semi-retirement from acting. Although he’s done well with other (professional) actors, Eastwood’s relaxed, unfussy directorial style is, unsurprisingly, a perfect fit for his tenser but similarly unfussy acting style. That’s more than evident in his newest movie-star farewell, The Mule. (Look for a 98-year-old Eastwood to say goodbye once again in an as-yet-untitled December 2028 feature.)
Eastwood isn’t necessarily an obvious choice to play Earl Stone, a flinty Korean War veteran who prizes his flower business and the accompanying horticultural hobnobbing, estranging him from his ex-wife, Mary (Dianne Wiest), and daughter, Iris (Alison Eastwood, Clint’s real-life daughter). Earl is based on a real-life figure, though loosely enough to warrant a full name change, and while his crankiness and racism seem customized for Eastwood, his glad-handing and ne’er-do-well charm feels more like Paul Newman or later-period Robert Redford. Even golden boy Redford tends to appear a little more rascally at the outset; it takes a little while to realize that Earl’s amusingly genteel interest in going to horticulturalist awards dinners is supposed to be cruelly neglectful to his family.
Facing hard times in his business (“Damn you, internet!” is not an exact line of dialogue, but nearly so) and his promise to help pay for the wedding of his granddaughter (Taissa Farmiga), Earl parlays his love of the American road into an unlikely gig delivering drugs for a powerful cartel. The job is simple: He pulls his beaten-up pick-up truck into a tire-store front, lets some cartel guys place a package in his covered flatbed, takes various scenic routes across various states, and parks his vehicle in a motel lot, where drugs are picked up and he receives an envelope of cash. Soon he’s paying for a nicer truck, the open bar at his granddaughter’s wedding, and in a particularly senior-friendly version of living large, the salvation of his local VFW and their raucous polka nights.
Once Earl gets started in the drug business, Eastwood starts cutting between his laid-back missions and the efforts of two DEA guys (Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña) to bust the cartel’s mule, who they don’t realize is an eightysomething texting novice who vexes some of his handlers with unscheduled detours for pulled-pork sandwiches. At one point, Cooper and Eastwood have an encounter in a coffee shop that’s not unlike the early-bird-special version of the diner scene in Heat.
Enough has changed culturally in a decade that Eastwood’s character joshing around with Latino drug dealers or casually referring to a black couple as “negroes” will be received less warmly than the grizzled bridge-building of Gran Torino; as in that movie, minority-populated gangs loom menacingly, not quite counterbalanced by some friendly nonwhite faces. But while this material is not always handled gracefully, the cartel guys are also ultimately not the real villains of the piece, as The Mule zeroes in on Earl’s late-breaking attempts to make things right with his family, more so than crime-picture showdowns. (Eastwood’s rapport with the lower-level cartel members is genuine, even warm, though it does imply that the true measure of a person’s worth is whether they feel comfortable bantering with a Clint Eastwood character or not.) If the drug dealers are caricatures, so too is Earl’s standoffish daughter, as poor Alison Eastwood has to swing from seething anger to affection in a matter of moments, with little humanity in between.
The movie also isn’t uncritical of Earl’s racism, though Eastwood naturally saves both his ire and his sympathy for race-related incidents that don’t directly involve Earl’s prejudices, like the mean cop who gets in the faces of Earl’s handlers for no real reason, or the brown-skinned character whose truck is mistaken for Earl’s. As he frantically explains to cops that “statistically, this is the most dangerous five minutes of my life,” Eastwood treats his fear with respect, a faint but appreciable echo of his ’90s movies like A Perfect World that consider the costs of both assumptions and violence.
The Mule is not quite A Perfect World. Like that 1993 film, it finds Eastwood performing (both as actor and director) in two of his most comfortable modes: ambling low-key pulp and quiet regretful elegy. He’s merged these interests plenty of other times, and in some ways, The Mule represents a late-period version of classic Eastwood, in that it’s even pokier and more workmanlike than his best work, and sometimes downright strange. The broader bits that used to jut out once or twice a movie, like the caricatured white-trash family in Million Dollar Baby, are more frequent, and thanks to Earl’s time at a drug dealer’s lavish party, this elegiac Clint Eastwood drama also has a lot of lingering shots of women’s butts. Yet Eastwood treats his own star persona with even more relaxed grace than usual, allowing the film to catch him singing along to the car radio or doing Jimmy Stewart impressions both intentional and not. There’s still star ego on display, but Eastwood allows it to fall away for a quietly effective ending. Whether it actually closes the curtain on his acting career or not, his trademark unfussiness has briefly become an advantage again.
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The trailer is a Trump supporting Fox News watching Social Security earners fever dream come to reality.
As with a lot of Eastwood, I can see how it would appeal to that audience, but I don’t know that the movie is as uncomplicated as its broadest readings would indicate.
Which is why, having not seen the film as you have been able to, I specifically referenced what is available to see right now, the trailer.
Oh, yeah, I’m just saying, it does look like that, but I’m happy to report that it’s at least somewhat more complicated (though far from spotless, ha). I imagine plenty will disagree, though! It already appears to be pretty divisive.
I won’t lie, the trailer turned me off. An unlikeable character in a modern day America hellscape of lost opportunity and hope surrounded by brown people menacingly displaying gang tattoos, automatic weapons and, a stunning lack of long-sleeved garments?Pass.
You’re a sensitive one. You know shit like this actually happens in the real world right? Gangs involved in drug running?! Has a Pro-Trump message written all over it alright.
Won’t someone think of the fictional character? Lol
wtf??? He is a drug mule for a Mexican Cartel!!! I think you are reading too far into this. Eastwood has made some damn good movies over the past 15 to 20 years. Sorry if they aren’t your style. He never pushes a narrative and typically lets you the viewer decide how you feel about the characters and story that occurred. I love his style of directing.
/rolls eyesYou even get annoyed with you, right?
Look for Eastwood’s final performance in “The A$$” where he talks to an empty chair believing it’s the president. (Spoiler alert.. he discovers there’s no one there and everyone has left the building)
How would it be a dream come to reality? I would imagine most Trump fans despise the idea of working with a cartel, yet here our protagonist does.
Trailers aren’t made by the movie maker. They’re made by trailer companies that are told by suits how to most effectively market the film. The actual movie is not indicative of the trailer.
It’s no Blood Work, but it’ll do.
do you mean googling “ATM robbery in LA” and finding the video in 5 seconds? Or the Ebert conservation-of-characters rule?
SPOILERIn Michael Connelly’s book, that character really was just a happy go lucky dude trying to help out. The killer wasnt anyone with a speaking role, like most murders. Imagine a world where every murder investigation actually had a twist ending, thats what most detective movies do, its ridiculous.
but that’s the stat, right? 99% of the time it’s somebody the detective knows!
The Mule is not quite A Perfect World. Like that 1993 film, it finds Eastwood performing (both as actor and director) in two of his most comfortable modes: ambling low-key pulp and quiet regretful elegy.A Perfect World is the underrated gem of both Eastwood’s directing and Kevin Costner’s acting careers.Costner’s especially, as I think it gives us a taste of the Costner we could have had if he had followed his Steve McQueen instincts instead of his Gary Cooper ones.
Yes! The Eastwood-acted parts are its weaker moments (though he does deliver a nice denouement of sorts), but his direction of Costner and Costner’s performance are lovely. Great stuff. I remember it was considered a major disappointment at the time, but it’s so much better than a lot of his later-period work that got a stronger pass!
i watched a perfect world with my parents as a kid and it’s the first time i remember a movie making me cry my eyes out. i’m gonna rewatch this weekend.
Costner is great, and so is half the movie, but there are a ton of jarring tonal shifts. Some stuff with the cops verges on slapstick
It’s a great movie, and my key to its success are the tone of the scenes with the boy. Those are so not “Hollywood-kid-actor”.
While I’m not fan of Eastwood’s politics i think he’s a decent director and actor. Though I haven’t really been much of a fan of his work after “Firefox”.
Firefox was a lot of fun! Watched it as a little kid obsessed w fighter jets and it really kept my attention.
Not a fan of his politics either, but I’d go so far as to say he’s one of the greatest American movie makers of all time. Once he hit his stride, he made some astoundingly great films. Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven are masterpieces, IMO.
Yeah… Decent director and actor… But after the talking-to-the-empty-chair-self-humiliation (in which Eastwood blamed Democrats(!) for the Iraq War quagmire) it became abundantly clear that Eastwood’s politics can’t be bothered to integrate facts that don’t align with his world views. Yup. It makes some of his work so cringe-inducing and ridiculous.
Eastweood was making fun of the people who blame democrats for everything.
An old man went on an incoherent speech? So what. He still made Million Dollar Baby, which defended euthanasia and seriously pissed off the right, made Gran Torino which more or less explicitly stated that the Hmong were more American than his middle class white children, and never killed an Indian in any western he starred in. He’s got my respect for that and much else
This film was filming down here in southern New Mexico earlier this year. We were happy to have the production staff of the film giving our state cash money since, (ahem), we can always use cash money.
f the
Ahahaha, I like how out of context the “Clint Eastwood seen in Las Cruces” chyron coupled with the image of a ton of cops (Eastwood is barely visible) suggests a manhunt to finally catch this “Dirty Harry” before he kills again.
I didn’t know that Dianne Wiest was still around. I always admired her as an actress. I will look forward to this movie, not only because of that but it’s got Eastwood in it too.
Just curious: does his spend a lot of his commute time talking to the empty seat next to him?
Clint is 88, not 98. I hope he gets to be 98 and makes a few more movies in that period.
The information in this story is incorrect. Eastwood stared in 2012’s Trouble with the curve and also had a uncredited cameo in American Sniper.
A movie is made about a man transporting drugs for drug cartels (in real life the Sinaloa cartel who is known for beheading rivals and disolving them in acid). Reviewer criticizes movie for making minority-populated gang “loom menacingly”. It is as if he doesn’t know that the murder count in Mexico is the third largest in the world (mostly cartel lead, with a chance of breaking the all time record for murders this year) with a population that is about 40% of the US but with thousands of more murders. But of course we cannot point out that other countries or cultures have any flaws, that is racist and he should have made all the criminals into WASPs. He also focuses on women’s butts. I guess this is what you call a movie review today, and shows how far the “profession” has fallen. The grade sounds about right for a recent Eastwood though.
“This review sucks, except the part I agree with”
That is probably the best one can hope for nowadays.
You’re welcome to recuse yourself from reading any future reviews I write!
You seriously complained about an 80 year old man using racial slurs in a drug movie. This goes on in America every day and is an accurate depiction of how an 80+ year old address minorities. I don’t use those words, nor condone them, but it is a reality.I feel sorry that you live such a sheltered life around like minded people so called “woke” people.
Actually, chum, what I “complained” about in my mixed-positive review of this movie, is that Eastwood reserves any dimensionality for the 80-year-old character, and gives very little of that to the minority characters, and defines those characters largely by whether they get to like this charming old codger or not. He sort of engineers a pass for his own character, because while he clearly doesn’t condone the language either, he also soft-pedals any kind of genuine reaction to it.I also mention that the minority characters, while thin, are not ultimately villainized, and that some of the white characters are also pretty thin and caricatured.The implication being that this movie is not especially graceful in its dealing with race, but also not hateful, either.In my mixed-positive review. But clearly I’m the oversensitive one, here.
Why does it have to deal with race to begin with?
I mean, you’d have to ask the filmmakers. They have not sidestepped the issue of race only to have me bring it up out of nowhere. They have decided to address it because movies are the results of decisions.
*I* actually was going to say this review is well-balanced and lacking in the normal AV Club “This guy sucks so his movie sucks NYAHHH schenanigans”.
how many stickers do you have on your late-90s truck?
Not an american. I actually know things about the rest of the world.
“I actually know things about the rest of the world, like how we all should be afraid of Mexicans but the movies and the reviewers won’t let us.”
When I was a kid, a Clint Eastwood came with two mules AND a Sister Sara.Now all we get is one lousy mule. Thanks, Obama!
clint eastwood is 98??????!!!!!! jeebus. also, what’s with that photo? is his character part-demon?
He’s 88; I was making a joke about him still making movies as a 98-year-old in 10 years.
I figure he’ll still be staring in movies like a marionette ala Weekend at Bernie’s, just like I’ve anticipated Disney will do with Stan Lee – not even death saves you from Disney’s contractual obligations.
I was told there would be no math
Pretty sure that’s Dennis Perkins who does SNL, wrong AV Clubber ma dude.
Reading comprehension not your strong suit, i see.
Somewhat indefensible opinion: Mystic River is Eastwood’s worst movie. Not only does it make no fucking sense, but there are boom mic and reflections of the camera rig in shots, TERRIble acting (though Kevin Bacon kills it) and it makes no fucking sense.
I haven’t seen it since it came out, and he’s definitely made worse movies (I mean, 15:17 is RIGHT THERE), but it’s definitely overblown, particularly the Robbins, Harden, and Penn performances and is probably the weakest of his most acclaimed movies.
might just be my own calculus for what makes a bad movie: it includes the talent that went into it or could have went into it (so Phantom Menace is the worst movie ever made because anyone would have worked on it to make it better for free) with disappointment in execution, and you also lose points for it either being acclaimed as a masterpiece when it sucks (not the best example but I really didn’t like Toni Erdmann) or gets lots of awards (The Artist, Crash2, SO many). So Marcia Gay Harden operatic schtick, technical incompetence, and Laura Linney turning into Lady Macbeth for no reason and making like killing his friend turned him into the Kingpin somehow…it just…and there were other things too I’ve repressed…it just melted my brain. Blood Work is an awful movie, Hereafter is a clinker also, I’ve successfully avoided 15:17, but people continuing to put Mystic River up there with Unforgiven gives it a special place in hell for me. It’s like Fox News saying Radiohead is the poor man’s Coldplay or people referring to the Paul Haggis “Racecrash” by the same name as Cronenberg’s “Crash” 😀 and it gives me something to be crotchety about!
It has one of Sean Penn’s most embarrassing performances. And he somehow won an Oscar.
I think it was a dare to let the academy give Sean Penn free airtime to spout off about the Iraq war, like Micahel Moore before him. Always good for ratings.
Robbins friggin’ sucks in it.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it but it definitely has a lot of bad BAWSTAHN in it, Bacon is indeed the best performer there by a wide margin.
Bacon was also the only real performance in Black Mass, also chock full of terrible accents.
Plemons plays a dull psychopath well (Rory Cochrane is probably too nuanced of a performance for Steve fucking Flemmi) and I like Joel Edgerton’s utter emptiness as Connolly quite a bit. But yeah, that movie was largely crap.
I think it’s a bad movie, too, but Eastwood has made more than a few that are much worse. Space Cowboys?? Blood Work??
Not sure why you’re dropping in on me on several threads, but if you look downstream you’ll see my answer to JH and why I think it is worse. Also, despite its manifold deficiencies, I find Space Cowboys pretty gosh-darn charming. My dad didn’t like “The Old Man and the Gun,” thought it was clunky and hackneyed…same thing, I thought it was charming as hell and had a big grin through the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not every time, I’d chew my leg off before watching “Bucket List” or “Last ___” or whatever many of those other old guy movies are.
Eastwood telling America to “shut the f_ck up” about Trump and denigrating what he calls the ‘pussy’ generation for being insufficiently macho places him in the same league as all the other Hollywood perverts and rapists that America has chosen to not support.
I mean, I think he expressed some loathsome sentiments but I’m NOT sure that puts him on the level of a rapist. If we’re talking levels.
Dude, that’s not how you argue on the internet. You’re take one subject you meant to take the thing you don’t like and free-associate it with another thing you don’t like.“People who talk loudly in quiet restaurants obviously molest small voles.”
If ever there was a person who proves they deserve to be told to shut the fuck up, it’s you 🙂
No, I will not shut the fuck up about loathsome hateful hateful people like Eastwood.
You make a lot of assumptions dickhead.
Loser.
I literally cannot tell if you are on the right or left you sound so unhinged. “Hollywood perverts and rapists” sounds like something General Ripper would say.
No, it doesn’t.
You are a fascist. From the Left, but a fascist. Mussolini started as a socialist, too.
He hasn’t made a good movie since Gran Torino. That was so great and this seems in that vein so I’m looking forward to this.
I only saw Gran Torino this year and was really surprised by how much I liked it, aside from sidelining the girl toward the end (she was great!). So yeah, this is promising.
Gran Torino has not aged well…….Also aren’t mules for drugs basically completely replaceable and know nothing.
Fuck him and fuck his politics. Hope it bombs.
Could we maybe grow up a bit? Learn to see some nuance?
What, you mean cutting a break to a man who says I’m pussifying America and I’m a whiny snowflake and “my kind” is everything that’s wrong with the world?Nope. Fuck him and fuck you, too. Can’t wait ‘til he dies.
My God did Clint say all these things to you??? Good heavens you must have disappointed him!
In all seriousness, anyone who writes the above comment can’t be reasoned with (“Fuck him and fuck you, too. Can’t wait ‘til he dies.” Really?) because they’re either gunning for attention or have a really screwy sense of the world. Good day
You are what is wrong with this world.
But does he yell at a chair in this one?
I thought the most dangerous 5 minutes of a cop’s life is passing their morning coffee and Krispy Kremes.
In this movie to Eastwood give a verbal beat-down to an empty chair?
The Mule is a predictable movie and theres not really much to say about it. But its still good and a well made version of this unoriginal story. Eastwood is redoing the old offensive yet still charming coot from Gran Torino and yeah, hes still really damn good at that. B.
Nah, I’m going with the other critics on this misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and all around deplorable pro-Wall propaganda. I’m sure you have zero issues with any of that, being comfortably out of those categories. And it’s sloppily shot and edited to boot; so much for Eastwood’s infamous “efficient filmmaking”.I want to see a single female director get to make two trash movies like this one and The 15:17 to Paris in a single year, and still get lauded for it. He and his enablers are beyond deplorable.
I don’t see how this movie is propaganda for much of anything. You can certainly accuse it of misogyny or racism or even, if you really want to reach for it, homophobia, but none of those qualities make something propaganda. And for Trump’s Wall? I’d say it’s pretty ineffective on that front, if that’s the idea. I’m not sure if Eastwood’s style is particularly suited to propaganda. Even American Sniper, which was largely embraced by that crowd (and isn’t a very good movie), is more muddled than jingoistic.As for whether I have “any issues” with those qualities because I’m a white straight dude (ya got me!), I think I actually raise those issues, in this mixed review? So I’m not sure what you’re getting at except demanding that I hate a movie on principle. If I gave every movie with questionable racial or sexual politics an “F,” it would get pretty boring around here, pretty fast.
It’s also a little disingenuous to complain about Eastwood “getting lauded” for his two movies. This one got mixed reviews. 15:17 got negative reviews (and was on our worst of the year list, deservedly so).
…did you see the movie?
I don’t know if it’s a hot take or not, but Gran Torino was comfortably one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But I don’t know if I’d still think that, given that a big reason for my hatred was that it was billed as Eastwood’s Last Acting Role Ever, wasted on sub-Hallmark channel bullshit.But then other things came out, and now this. So I don’t know what to think anymore.
Nah
Eastwood is perhaps American Cinema’s biggest contradiction. It’s most overrated director and most underrated actor.
I have read that this old coot has TWO three-ways in this movie?!? That can’t be true.
It may not be perfect, but for years I though the last time I’d see Eastwood on screen would be him yelling at an empty chair at the Republican National Convention, so I’ll take what I can get.
I’m so tired of reading reviews and comments about the morality of films and not about their artistic values. It’s the 80s Moral Majority again, with the same goals and methods. “But this time we are right, and they were wrong!”, says the Millennial Left. Well, that’s the point.
Has anyone told Jesse that he doesn’t have to jump into the comments and argue with every single person who says something stupid? It makes the site look more unprofessional than it already does.
Going forward, I’ll only respond to people who post incredibly smart comments, like yours.
This movie is truly terrible. It has nothing new to say; the acting is bad; the filmcraft on display is borderline inept.This is a film aimed straight at the heart of Middle American Baby Boomers and Silent Generations, feeding their fears and prejudices by giving them a safe place to be racist in the dark for two hours.It’s a film starring a 90-year-old protagonist who throws around words like “Negro” and “Dyke”— but don’t worry, it’s all in good fun and the people he speaks those obscenities to give him a pass. A film with a protagonist who jokes about the Hispanic day laborers at his greenhouse being deported because of the music they listen to; a protagonist who curses the “damned internet” for stealing his livelihood.He’s estranged from his family, you see, because he was too busy partying at horticulture conferences in a bowtie to attend his only daughter’s wedding, but can’t seem to understand why she and his ex-wife refuse to be in the same room with him. It’s all right, though, because his ex-wife and daughter are harpie shrews who want to ruin his relationship with his granddaughter, the only member of the family naive enough to expect anything but disappointment from him (HE MISSED HIS DAUGHTER’S WEDDING BECAUSE HE DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE A MIXER AT A HORTICULTURE CONFERENCE).Clint Eastwood looks and emanates 90-year-old crustiness straight from his core, with pants pulled up to his chest, listening to the tiredest, most played-out music (Ain’t That a Kick in the Head and On the Road Again, they just don’t make music like they used to, you know?), very obviously driving under the speed limit in the left lane of a highway in his beat up old truck, but somehow every woman gazes at him with barely-restrained lust— and indeed, he manages not one but TWO threesomes in this film without breaking a hip or dying of a heart attack mid-coitus.Now securely in his auteur phase, Bradley Cooper is rapidly becoming one of my least favorite actors. Without a strong director to give him notes, he alternates between boring good-guy blandness and smarmy assholishness, neither of which are all that interesting. Michael Pena and Laurence Fishburn are actually just listed as “DEA Agent” on the Mule’s IMDB page, and I actually don’t remember if they had real names. The cartel that Eastwood runs drugs for is populated mostly with C-actors from Fast & Furious films and basic cable dramas like Sons of Anarchy. I’m not sure they were even given a script, just told to play different types of Hispanic stereotypes. Their boss, Andy Garcia, adds some welcome fun into the movie— but alas, he’s dead before you know it because God forbid we have fun in this fucking movie.The trio of female actors with anything resembling a character— that is, not just there to serve as a sex object for Clint Eastwood to writhe his wrinkled body upon— struggle to inject any empathy into their characters but it’s a real no-win scenario. His ex-wife coughs once, gets cancer and dies, but manages to forgive him because he gives her a few sips from a juice box before she croaks.His daughter also forgives him after 2 hours of complete scorn, but I’m not really sure why. He spends a few days with the family before the DEA finally catches up with him and arrests him. The family sits behind him in solidarity while he interrupts his lawyer’s extremely valid argument for leniency (because he’s a confused old man) and loudly pleads guilty to be sent away to prison for whatever remains of his lifespan. Even at the end, he’d rather be locked up and growing flowers in the prison garden than putting one iota of effort into his family life. They somehow support this, though, and promise to visit him “whenever they can”.The level of filmmaking craft on display here is embarrassingly amateur. Like American Sniper and most of Eastwood’s other films in the last two decades, this movie is flat and dull as if someone just put a camera on a tripod and walked away. Clint Eastwood’s filmmaking ethos seems to be in direct opposition to mine, and although he’s made visually and technically impressive movies in the distant past— The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bridges of Madison County leap to mind— he’s just not contributing anything interesting to the artform anymore. Like an elderly man who needs his license taken away because it’s not safe for him to drive anymore, Clint Eastwood needs his director’s license revoked.Here’s the crazy thing. The people that like this movie are most likely to be the kinds of people that support a giant wall being built between Mexico and the United States. This movie completely invalidates that strategy in fighting the drug war. When brown people can no longer smuggle drugs, this movie posits, it will be our feeble racist grandparents who take up the helm.