A feather-brained film – but at least Clint stays fully clothed
Cry Macho
12 cert, 104 min ★★
Dir: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Eduardo Minett, Natalia Traven, Dwight Yoakam, Fernanda Urrejola
For his 39th film as a director, Clint Eastwood has gone back to retrieve a role he turned down in 1988. Back then, he was intrigued by the 1975 novel by N Richard Nash, but thought himself too young; he almost cast Robert Mitchum in his place, but that didn’t pan out.
The bad news is that Cry Macho, in the Eastwood-starring version now before us, doesn’t pan out too well either. This Tex-mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm, but is also slack and feather-brained.
Eastwood’s Mike Milo, a loner cowboy with one big debt to pay off, gets a few moments of vinegary attitude, cries once, under his hat, about the wife and child he lost to a car accident, and contemplates the meaning of machismo in a world that’s stopped paying it so much heed. He also has a feisty rooster, called Macho, which tags along for the ride.
Mike is dispatched by his cold fish of an ex-boss (Dwight Yoakam) to rescue the latter’s 13-year-old son from Mexico City, where his barracuda of a mother (Fernanda Urrejola) has long stopped caring. Named Rafa, and played with excess ingratiation by the Mexican actor Eduardo Minett, the kid is a tearaway involved in illegal cockfighting, but is really just a vulnerable child of callous parents, who needs as many Clint-dispensed life lessons as the script can pack in.
Women still find the 91-year-old Eastwood irresistible, of course: the boy’s mother (who’s 40-odd) swiftly coaxes him into her boudoir, and he’s also drawn to the embrace of a kindly widowed grandmother called Marta, who runs a delightful roadside inn. Hilariously, she’s presented as the age-appropriate match, despite 52-year-old Natalia Traven being the actress who warmly portrays her.
To be fair, Eastwood at least keeps his clothes on, following the threeway motel romp he enjoyed in The Mule, his last collaboration with Gran Torino screenwriter Nick Schenk. Then again, those characters supplied an edge by kicking up a stink: he’s just sailing through a lot of non-problems here with feeble gestures towards mature insight.
The unfortunate view of Mexico as a nest of vipers makes Cry Macho a kissing cousin to Stallone’s dreadful Rambo: Last Blood. Instead of the OTT violence to which a near-identical plot led us there, we get regressive notions of how a wrinkled gringo might help out around the place.
While it’s feasible to indulge this because of Eastwood’s living legacy, the dopey rhythms leave everything running idle. If “macho’s overrated”, as Mike eventually wants us to accept, why does Rafa’s pointedly named pet keep flapping in to save this pair heroically from peril? This daredevil cock is one metaphor for manhood that didn’t get the memo.
In cinemas from today