Slapdash Mule comes up short
THE MULE ★★ 1/2 out of 5
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Alison Eastwood
Director: Clint Eastwood
Duration: 1h56m
Is Clint Eastwood slowing down? At 88, he’s one of the oldest directors working today, and while his last feature, The 15:17 to Paris, felt a little lazy, the previous one, 2016’s Sully with Tom Hanks, was solid work.
The Mule, loosely based on a true tale, feels like the storytelling reins are slipping a little again. In 2011, Leo Sharp, a horticulturalist and drug courier (try putting that on your LinkedIn profile) was arrested with 90 kilos of cocaine in the back of his pickup. He was 87.
Eastwood plays Sharp, here renamed Earl Stone, who we meet in 2005, wining and dining his way through the flower-show circuit while ignoring his family, including ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest) and daughter Iris (Alison Eastwood, Clint’s actual daughter). But a quick cut to 2017 shows him facing bankruptcy — “Damned internet ruins everything,” he grouses.
That’s when he meets a friend of a friend of his granddaughter, who notes the old man’s perfect road record and suggests he take on work as a driver for — well, no sense beating about the bush — a drug cartel. Earl signs up as a low-key version of Jason Statham’s Frank ‘Transporter’ Martin, and is soon doing regular runs from El Paso to Chicago.
He makes the trip from A to B many times, and the movie does likewise. We never get to know his Mexican confederates very well, and neither does Earl, who claims they all look alike to him. (In one of the movie’s weirder bits of dialogue, he also has to be schooled not to use the term “Negro” when addressing black folk.) Andy Garcia pops up as the cartel boss, at one point inviting Earl to a party in Mexico. (Sicario this ain’t.)
On the other side of the law are Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña as a couple of DEA agents, with Laurence Fishburne as their boss, demanding they make some high-profile busts pronto. They in turn lean on a cartel functionary (Clifton Collins Jr.) who will eventually lead them to Earl — though in several close calls with the police, Earl always manages to old-man his way out of trouble.
The film runs almost two hours and is a remarkably languid affair most of the time — we get endless shots of Earl on the road, crooning along with the oldies, interspersed with angry Mexicans telling him to follow orders, and payment envelopes that keep getting thicker. To make sure we’re fully on Earl’s side, he uses most of the cash to help local veterans and pay for his granddaughter’s education, thus bringing him close to his family again. He may be hauling coke, but he’s dope.
The time on the road works against the character’s emotional arc, which is thinly sketched. It’s clear Eastwood still has the chops to make a good movie, but this one doesn’t quite make the grade. It feels slapdash; you can believe the stories that this director does two takes of every scene and calls it a day. It’s economical storytelling, but who wants to travel economy?