The Mule 15A ALSO OUT THIS WEEK Second Act 12A Love Sonia 18
Clint Eastwood’s new film arrives here untroubled by major award nominations but having taken almost $100million at the American box office. And for once the American cinema-going public are not wrong: The Mule is both surprisingly watchable and touchingly good, with Eastwood – who directs and stars – on impressive form, both in front of and behind the camera.
At heart, this is a ‘county lines’ story, albeit with the action unfolding in America and with a Mexican drug cartel not using young teenagers to transport their product but a 90-year-old horticulturalist who has fallen on hard times.
After all, who would suspect someone like fraillooking Earl Stone (Eastwood), who has been put out of business by the internet and now has little more to his name than a clean driving licence and a rusty pick-up? Perfect, thinks the man from the cartel. But Earl, a grizzled veteran of the Korean war and a man who knows he has made plenty of mistakes, is not a man to blink when someone shoves a gun under his nose.
Don’t expect another Grand Torino: it’s subtler, gentler and a little more sentimental than that. But if you enjoyed Robert Redford’s The Old Man And The Gun, you should enjoy this too. Remember Working Girl with Melanie Griffith? Well, Second Act is a bit like that only this time with Jennifer Lopez (right) playing the under-appreciated saleswoman from Queens whose career has always been held back by her lack of a college education. Until one fateful evening when her best friend’s internetsavvy son posts a fake CV online and she instantly lands a job as a product development consultant at a glitzy Manhattan cosmetics company.
There’s no doubts she has the ‘street smarts’ to do the job, but what happens if and when her lies are found out?
Aimed clearly at a whooping ‘you go, girl’ kind of crowd, it’s a formulaic comedy that breaks no new ground at all. But Lopez, who spends most of the film with her cleavage set on stun, is good at this sort of thing and gets particularly effective support from both her underwiring and from Leah Remini, playing her splendidly foul-mouthed best friend. Best of all, nobody sings The Lady In Red.
Destroyer 15
Every awards season, there’s always one would-be hopeful that comes badly unstuck and this year, I am pleased to say, it’s this one, with Nicole Kidman all too clearly hoping that a spot of ‘uglying up’ would do for her awards cabinet what Monster once did for Charlize Theron. Well it won’t, with Kidman dismayingly unconvincing as a hard-drinking and physically wrecked Los Angeles police detective who nobody likes and nobody wants to work with but who seems to know a lot about someone called Silas. Look out for a lot of overacting and a really annoying twist. Set mainly in modern-day India and played out predominantly in subtitled Hindi, this is a single-issue film about international sex trafficking. It’s not an enjoyable watch but it’s well made, authenticfeeling and very powerful thanks to fine performances from a cast led by Mrunal Thakur, as Sonia, the naive country girl who becomes the property of a ruthless Mumbai brothel owner, and a strong supporting cast that includes Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto. Matthew Bond