Did Eastwood's sense of quality take a holiday?

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2009)

Eastwood has shown us many times before he understands the art of movie-making. That's why it's so confusing to see he was able to make such an embarrassing, almost amateuristic movie. Yes, in the beginning of the movie some of the over the top grumpy, racist, cynical one-liners are quite amusing, but then it just turns into an embarrassing spectacle of bad acting, bad writing, bad editing, just bad movie-making. The acting of the girl, and especially the boy next door are just gutwrenching to watch. My head was spinning by such a display of amateurism. I try to understand how on earth they could have ended up in an Eastwood movie. Are they his adopted children or children of friends or something? For sure he's doing somebody a huge favor to include them in the movie. Some of the scenes are really beyond bad. What's up with him connecting with the Asian kids by fixing the washing machine in the basement? The whole idea of the scene is stupid and embarrassing, let alone the execution of it. And than the scene when they are waiting for the girl, not sure what happened to her. Eastwood stares at his hand saying (something like) "at least in Korea we were expecting to loose one of us".... Can it get more cheesy than that? I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. And than the scenes with the barber. The initial idea works out well and amusing - the barber and Eastwood doing their grumpy routine. But than they try and milk the idea and even introduce the boy (deprived of all acting skills) into their 'domain of real men' to teach him the way of Men (to curse). It just gets so embarrassing, you just want to leave the theater and get drunk to simply destroy the brain cells that stored the whole thing, to save you from uncomfortable flashbacks for the rest of your life. Let's just hope mr. Eastwood had a blackout, let's just hope his sense of quality returns and let's hope the majority of IMDb-ers grow a sense of quality so 'movies' like this don't end up in the top 100 of all time again.