Eastwood swings weakly and misses with Cry Macho

It was Clint Eastwood… 91-year-old Clint Eastwood, yes, granted… but it was still Clint Freaking Eastwood, so why wouldn’t we watch Cry Macho? Turns out… the reasons not to watch this film are myriad.

From a glance at the trailers, Cry Macho looked like another in the line of Gran Torino or The Mule—showing us a past-his-prime anachronism rising, despite it all, to meet a final challenge. In Cry Macho, Eastwood’s protagonist is Mike Milo (played by Clint), a long-retired rodeo star with a long (long, long) life of heartache. Milo’s challenge, as presented by his former boss Howard Polk (played by Dwight Yoakam), is to retrieve Polk’s 13-year-old son Rafa (over played by Eduardo Minett) from “trouble” he has found in Mexico. Milo’s rodeo career was cut short by a serious back injury. The accident, coupled with the death of his wife and son, pushed the Cowboy to depression and self-destruction from which Polk has helped Milo recover, at least to some degree. Now Polk is asking Milo to return the favor and find his son and bring him to the border—the boy is the payback. The plot (based on a 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash) and its challenge are well setup for the redemption of a fallen hero—if only our hero were 30 years younger. The Milo character from the Nash novel was one year removed from his rodeo career when he accepted the heroes challenge; Eastwood’s Milo in Cry Macho is over a half-century away from his wrangling days. It’s a contradiction that plagues the telling of Milo’s story and Eastwood’s direction, and one that the film can’t escape from even if it tried—and it didn’t.

No one should begrudge Eastwood (who also directed Macho) for continuing to make and act in movies. It is clear, even from the mess that is Cry Macho, that he can still, at 91, command the screen. But instead of choosing a character and story that utilize and leverage what Eastwood is today, he asks us to suspend reality and our understanding of the laws of nature so he can pretend to be something that he can no longer be. The film nods only briefly and lightly to the absurdity of Eastwood’s proposal when Rafa asks Milo why, if his father wants him so badly, would he “send and old man to do the job.” The remainder of the story and its characters, however, treat Eastwood’s Milo as if he were Sergeant Highway from Heartbreak Ridge (the aging hero thing worked in Heartbreak… Eastwood was 56 in that one). Through the dull gauntlet the pair face on their journey to the border, Milo is seduced (with unclear motivation) by Rafa’s gangster-like mother (young enough to be Milo’s granddaughter) who also wants to find the boy, he strikes fear in and punches out one of the mother’s young henchmen, falls into a romance with a cantina owner half his age who can’t stop making goo-goo eyes at him, and breaks a wild bronco in a ride that would have surely snapped the real Eastwood completely in half. We watch saddened at the spectacle… shaking our heads, rolling are eyes, groaning at the worst of it, and wondering aloud why Eastwood would choose this hoax—there must have been better things to create.  

The difficulty of Eastwood’s decision to slam a square peg into a round hole seems to poison the rest of the execution of the film—its dialog is awkward; performances, even from the usually interesting Yoakam, are stilted; and the film has an over all lower-budget, made-for-TV feel about it. Eastwood glimmers with the occasional poignant or resonating oration but it is not nearly enough. Here is to Eastwood finding a more appropriate vehicle and giving us one more good flick to wash the bad taste of this one away. Cry Macho is a stinker, 3 out of 10.

In the end, Ten Rings is like all the rest

 

I had sworn off Marvel Superhero movies—at least for a spell. But they said Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was different… I should have known better. I like Marvel Movies. I was a Marvel comic book kid back in the day. But after 24 Marvel Universe films (Ten Rings is the 25th), I’ve tired some of the super-hero action film arc which always ends in the overblown boss battle and the inevitable set up for the next installment… always propping the next installment.  I had hoped that featuring an new “second tier” marvel hero might give the genre a chance to display a different spirit and trajectory—might be less over-the-top.  And Ten Rings had a hopeful start; it was intriguing in its early stages when its heroes were unencumbered by complicated mythology, magical messiness, and the din and confusion that eventually come in these films as the focus evolves (or devolves) from story to the collision of superpowers. The Legend of Ten Rings was different for a while and then it was just all of the rest… meh. 

It’s not that Ten Rings is bad movie—It has its strengths. One is the casting of Awkwafina (Ocean’s 8, Crazy Rich Asians) as the hero Shang-Chi’s (played by Simu Liu) friend-slash-side kick. Known more for her rap and comedic chops than for action flims, Awkwafina’s Katy provides personality and fun to the introduction of Shang-Chi’s back story of a secret past life with a powerful but broken family. The two close friends work together as hotel valets. Shang is using this unassuming lifestyle to hide from his past life and his misguided and sometimes criminal super-powered father (Xu Wenwu, better known, or represented, in the Marvel Universe as the Mandarin, see Iron Man 3), and Katy is searching for her own path outside of the high expectations of her family and friends. This well-crafted shared uncertainty of place creates a bond between the two that nicely underpins the course of the film. A second highlight is the sweet hand-to-hand fighting that ensues when Shang’s past finally catches up to him. During an attack by a family gang attempting to recover a pendant gifted to Shang by his mother, Shang reveals hidden fighting skills honed under his father's draconian training methods producing the slickest actions scenes of the film—Bruce and Jackie would be proud of the Kung Fu Fighting (well… maybe not Bruce). Alas, from there the clean lines of the early stages of story and action become muddled by the powers of his father’s Ten Rings (mystical weapons of unknown origin), a magical hidden village, an array of mythological beasts, imprisoned soul-consuming reptile minions, and Ben Kingsley and a faceless dog.    

I note that a quick look at the summary review stats for Ten Rings indicates that most of the professional critics and viewers have no problem with the fantasy-heavy and frenetic montage of plot and action components—Ten Rings is Certified Fresh according to Rotten Tomatoes. I agree that the film is entraining—my complaint is that each rendition of superhero film, including this one, reverts to what seems to be an obligation to, in the end, create such a plethora of action and mind-boggling escalation of superpowers that the viewer struggles to comprehend what is what and who is who in the fight. Everything must be thrown from the screen at us as if the volume of it was the ultimate measure of “fresh” or entertaining. Maybe it is. Maybe I am missing something. I just think it would be nice to see a new Marvel superhero arc equation—one that doesn’t end up at the same coordinates as all of the rest. Still... 6 out of 10.