Ladies and Gentlemen the Comedy Stylings of Clint Eastwood! You know someone is aging gracefully when he can fill an entire movie with old man jokes. Clint mutters, spits, and snarls over how kids are these days, his stupid family, and the new neighbors next door. Almost every sentence there is a racial epithet or an insult. You can get away with that when you're super old. You've lived too long to give a damn about what people who haven't lived as long as you think. He throws his son out of the house when he suggests moving to a retirement community. He tells his Asian neighbors to stay away from his dog. He spits near his granddaughter when she expresses his interest in his 74' Gran Torino. He spends his days taking care of his house and sitting on the porch smoking and downing Pabst Blue Ribbons. In short, this is the sort of tough guy that Clint Eastwood made a career out of. Now he's taking that guy and creating a really good comic situation by surrounding him by Hmong immigrants at the twilight of his life. Sure the plot has a gang violence center to it and a lot of the drama concerns how Eastwood tries to man up an at risk boy named Thao, but what really struck me about this movie is how funny it is. There are more than a dozen great one-liners. A lot of the attention this movie is getting for Eastwood is not unfounded. Watching I cannot imagine anyone else pulling off as good a performance. And that's not just because there's nobody left Eastwood's age that has good enough health to do it. Actually I take that back. One of the reasons this character is cool is because he's so old and still has so much life in him. When an elder tells a teenager to stop being such a pussy and calls a young priest a virgin with no life experience I knew I was watching something special.
The movie is also important in how it deals with the gang plot. In a usual Eastwood movie, say Unforgiven, you would expect the whole thing to end with a shootout. That doesn't happen here although the possibility of one is definitely foreshadowed. It does go to show that in the twilight of his career Eastwood is making an amends with the vigilante spirit he created with his wild west and dirty harry films. In this movie there is a respect for the avenues of law enforcement weird as that may sound in an Eastwood pic.
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