The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
It sucks to watch your heroes get old. Whether it’s watching a legendary ballplayer tip his cap for the last time or watching an iconic band take the stage to the realization that they are now the old men that they once rebelled against, there is nothing that makes one feel the weight of their years as poignantly as realizing that your childhood heroes won’t be around much longer. Cry Macho made me feel absolutely ancient. It was not just the sight of a 91-year-old Clint Eastwood that made me feel like a relic, but the lifeless nature of the film itself. This is a tired, meandering film that drifts endlessly without ever getting anywhere. It’s like listening to my grandfather tell me a story about the railroad as a kid; the story could have started or ended anywhere and it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I still tried to feign intertest out of respect for the man telling the tale.
Eastwood directs the film and plays Mike Milo, a retired rodeo star. Mike is hired by his former boss to go into Mexico and retrieve his son Rafo, who has gone missing. Mike travels to Mexico, finds Rafo and brings him back to his father. That’s really it.
The plot is oddly similar to The Marksman from earlier this year, minus the meager action offered by that movie, but it isn’t fair to label Cry Macho derivative of anything recent. The film is based on a novel from 1975 and several attempts have been made to bring it to the big screen over the decades. Eastwood actually first considered the project in 1988 but ultimately passed on it. It actually started filming in 1991 with Roy Scheider in the lead role, but the film wasn’t completed (I haven’t found an explanation for this). Then Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to star in the film in the early 2000s before he decided to run for office instead. Now, 33 years after he was originally offered the project, Eastwood finally decided that now is the time. I feel like this should go without saying, but one should not be considering the same projects at age 91 as they were at age 58.
Quite simply, very little happens in this film. The journey to retrieve the son is surprisingly uneventful and lacking tension. Hell, it basically lacks an antagonist. The boy’s mother sends some goons after them, but they are more background noise than anything else. I’m a big fan of road trip movies, with the caveat that something actually happens along the road. This feels like a fairly uneventful incident captured on a home movie and sent to theaters for some reason. They meet some people, get into a couple of half-assed fights and I checked my watch a dozen times. There isn’t a notable villain or story arc or anything. The theme, I suppose, is supposed to be of an old, tough guy telling a kid that they shouldn’t live their lives according to what society expects of them. But the film does little with this. There is zero chemistry between Mike and Rafo and whatever life lessons the film is meant to impart are ironically pretty damn lifeless.
Then there is Eastwood himself. I grew up loving this man’s films. He is an iconic Hollywood figure, the type of star that doesn’t really exist anymore. And it is now painful for me to watch him. For the first time, he truly looked like an old man to me. Even the Eastwood from 10 years ago could still pull this off, but father time has finally won. When he punches someone in the film, I was concerned about his hand, not the other guy’s face. He just can’t do this convincingly anymore and it pains me to say that. I want to remember Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, not as an old shadow of himself.
After the movie, my friend said there was no way I could get to 700 words about such an uneventful film. I’m happy to say that he was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very wrong. Boom.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Macho_(film)#/media/File:Cry_Macho_film_poster.png
