Rating: 2.0/5.0 |
CHICAGO – With his second film in just a few months, Clint Eastwood makes one of his biggest missteps of his illustrious career as one of the more esteemed American directors in the history of the medium. Eastwood has made some undeniable masterpieces - “Mystic River”, “Million Dollar Baby”, “Unforgiven” - but he has been far from perfect, misfiring wildly with films like “Space Cowboys”, “The Rookie”, and “Pink Cadillac”. “Gran Torino” falls much closer to the latter category on Clint’s spectrum than the former.
Eastwood stars in “Gran Torino” as Walt Kowalski, a bitter, cranky, snarling old man, who is mean to his priest, vicious to his family, and racist to everyone in his increasingly ethnic neighborhood. Walt could be Clint’s iconic ‘Dirty Harry’ character a few years down the road from when we last saw him and a bit more racist. (In fact, there were rumors at one point that “Gran Torino” would be “Dirty Harry 6”. If only.)
Walt is a Korean War vet who seems to have entered a contest for the most ignorant, racist comments in the span of the running time of a movie. Can the Hmong family next door melt the ice around this grumpy old man’s heart? Can the vet with backbone to spare give some to the weak kid who lives next door? Why should we care again?
In the opening scenes, Walt’s wife has passed away and he’s growing increasingly distant from the rest of his family. The predictable and skin-deep plot doesn’t really get underway until the kindly Hmong teenager next door named Thao (Bee Vang) tries and fails to steal the only thing he loves - his 1972 Gran Torino. Walt just wants to be left alone by a world he hates more every day, but he’s sucked into a horrible written gang war when he saves Thao from an altercation on his neighbor’s front lawn because the poor kid couldn’t steal the car he was ordered to snag. Let’s hope “Get off my lawn” doesn’t take off like “Make my day.”
What first feels like it could be a “Deathwish” rip-off becomes something far scarier when Thao is forced by his family to become an indentured servant to Walt. The old man finds himself getting closer and closer to the immigrants that he used to hate and realizes that he has one last sacrifice to make.
The script for “Gran Torino” by Nicholas Schenk is paper-thin. Eastwood adds some likability to a few scenes with his only friend, a barber played by a great actor named John Carroll Lynch, and there are a few moments between the angry vet and the awkward teen that work, but Schenk is constantly pounding his audience over the head with his obvious themes. In case you don’t get that Walt is growing closer to the people he continuously derides, Schenk is there to point it out to you.
Perhaps the TV-movie nature of the screenplay wore off on the production because “Gran Torino” is Eastwood’s least interesting film visually in years. There’s a grace and a style to the cinematography of Eastwood regular Tom Stern in films like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River” that’s simply missing here. “Gran Torino” looks like it was made in two weeks for a TV broadcast. There’s nothing wrong with simple production value for a simple story but “Gran Torino” crosses from simple to visually dull.
Everything about “Gran Torino” is a cliche. Walt’s racism, the immigrants next door, the hilariously stereotypical gang members, even the stupid jokes that Walt tells - none of it feels real. And at the center of it all is the cliche of Clint Eastwood’s angry, snarling persona. There’s a difference between using a popular reputation as a commentary, which some critics have mistakenly seen in “Gran Torino”, and the caricature that’s really at the center of this misguided film.
[17] | By BRIAN TALLERICO [18] |
Links:
[1] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/users/briantt
[2] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/ahney-her
[3] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/bee-vang
[4] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/brian-haley
[5] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/brian-tallerico
[6] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/christopher-carley
[7] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/clint-eastwood
[8] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/detroit
[9] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/dirty-harry
[10] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/geraldine-hughes
[11] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/gran-torino
[12] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/john-carroll-lynch
[13] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/labels/review.html
[14] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/mystic-river
[15] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/nick-schenk
[16] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/tom-stern
[17] mailto:brian@hollywoodchicago.com
[18] http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/about#BRIAN