Eastwood wit lost in Mule
The Mule (M, 116 min) Directed by Clint Eastwood Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★
After a six-decade career, Clint Eastwood has announced that he’s not quitting yet. And that surprised me. Because The Mule, Eastwood’s latest, and his first shift acting in a film he is directing since 2008’s extraordinarily satisfying
Gran Torino, really would have made a grand place to sign off. However, not necessarily for the right reasons. The story is based, extraordinarily loosely, on the true story of Leo Sharp, who was arrested at the age of 87 after a decade of driving cocaine and cash around the North American countryside on behalf of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Eastwood was charmed enough by the tale to employ his Gran Torino writer Nick Schenk to bash out a script. Which Schenk has done in a fashion that leaves little doubt as to why he hasn’t worked much since his breakthrough in 2008.
The Mule is a film in which every line of dialogue is either superfluous, groaningly contrived or merely expository.
Mexican gangsters, for whom the phrase ‘‘straight out of central casting’’ could have been invented, wave their pistols around in the expected fashion, before grudgingly falling for Eastwood’s home-spun charm. Andy Garcia, a cartel drug lord living – of course – in a terracotta mansion apparently staffed exclusively by women in bikinis, demands to meet his geriatric star mule and – in a scene of which the unintentional creepiness is almost impossible to convey – insists on treating him to a night of imponderable fun with two of those same women. The idiocies pile up high. Despite learning that the DEA – represented by Laurence Fishburne, Bradley Cooper and Michael Pena – are stopping random black SUVs identical to his on the roads that Eastwood’s ‘‘Earl Stone’’ is driving, the cartel do nothing at all to change the appearance of Stone’s car. That’s even though one of Stone’s collection points is an actual autospray business.
The moment I was waiting for, as Stone pauses to acknowledge that he has paid for his retirement and the cloying rehabilitation of his relationships with his children and ex-wife by transporting poison for murderers, simply never arrives. One of the most indelible moments in 2016’s Moonlight happens when Mahershala Ali’s character confronted the truth that the good he had done in his life had been funded by profiting from addiction and death. The Mule contains no such insight or intelligence. Stone is simply allowed to totter into incarcerated retirement, apparently now loved and respected by all. Listen, maybe you will simply be glad that Eastwood is still out there making films. After 2016’s Sully, I am still prepared to believe the old tuatara has a few good moves left to pull. But The Mule is a cloth-eared vanity project with little of Eastwood’s trademark wit or grudging humanity to commend it.