Predictable and Cliché, enjoyable only for the sheep.

Rating: 1/10 (13 January 2009)

If there's a handbook out there on how to make an award worthy movie, Eastwood not only has it, but lives by it. For most people Gran Torino will be on their top list of the year, but Gran Torino is chalked full of content that screams "award worthy" that it has the opposite effect. And the mistakes in this film are too obvious to ignore. At least for me they are.
Despite the praise this movie is getting, this is nowhere near the best of the year, or any best list altogether. This is a 2 hour instructional on how to make a movie with little to no budget that gets people talking about awards for it. So let me prove why that is.
Cookie cutter characters, and Grand Torino is full of them. From Walt ( Eastwood ), to Thao, Thao's sister, the entire Hmong family next door, the gangsta cousin, and the Priest. When you start with generic characters you're going to have a generic story. But wait, if it's generic ( AND IT IS ) why are people talking awards? Why was the screenplay so honored? Simple, you add in the "choker scene".
Despite being a generic story with generic characters there is one scene in the movie people will get choked up on. And I'm going to spoil that. Thao's sister gets raped. OMG HOW POWERFUL WAS THAT!! There I just listed what everyone talking about how they felt when they saw her. At this point in the movie the story already changed gears twice. Now this is the third change and its the gripper. Its the one that makes people say how powerful this movie is ( it isn't ) If anything it was a joke, when she came walking through the door I laughed cause I thought " OH here's the award moment right here." But people eat this stuff up and Eastwood knows it. Cause they did.
With the rape scene being the third story change I want to recap what happened before it. At first you see Walt hates his family, his neighborhood, the priest, and his neighbors. This goes on for a while. THEN SOMETHING HAPPENS!! Walt is liked by his neighbors, and in standard Hollywood fashion he learns more about the Hmong's which is basically a homage to any movie made where a foreigner is taught the customs and heritage of another race through an intelligent interpreter. That intelligent interpreter being Thao's sister ( SEE SO THE RAPE SCENE IS MORE POWERFUL LATER ) Add in something Walt does to SHOCK THE HMONG FAMILY, a mysterious Hmong shaman reads his fortune, Walt having a good time, and a conversation with Thao and end scene. Good to go to the next story change.
From that point on the movie is Walt warming up to Thao and the rest of the Hmongs. Now these guys are good pals. But there's a lot missing in this I feel. Thao goes from Forrest Gump quiet to "won't shut the hell up" in the course of a montage of him doing yard work in the neighborhood. I liked quiet Thao. But no-so-quiet Thao was annoying. From this point on I had a hard time figuring out what the point of this movie was.
And the lack of any really message left me thinking this movie served only one purpose. To win awards. And the screenplay did win one. And I think Clint won one as well. So as far as that end goes the movie was a success.
But for me its more than just about the awards. I've watched a lot of critically acclaimed and award winning movies over the years and for the majority of them they suck. They suck cause they all follow the same sort of pattern. They go to the play book on how to put scenes together and what to do in them that make it predictable. And your award winning moment is always something that shocks people. So Thao's sister being raped is that scene, how it played out was predictable, and what happened after it was uneventful. And in the end your left with a movie that doesn't change anything that you perceive or thought before you saw it.
There's no real emotion being had in this movie. Mostly cause the characters aren't likable. Thao's sister, annoying. Thao, interesting, then became annoying. Walt, funny, but too predictable to even care about. Walt could've have been likable but I had a problem when it was over. He liked the Hmongs who he befriended that summer more than his own family of 50 years. What a dork. I mean he couldn't even open up to them. But Thao was like the son he never had. But the catch is Thao wasn't any better a person than Walt's sons. Thao was better than his grand-kids, but the sons weren't worthy of so much hatred from the old man, at least not from what I saw.
Overall this movie is a disaster. Sure you get wisecracking Eastwood, but you also get feed a lot mixed messages and movie cliché's that make your eyes roll. And to top it off you get Eastwood singing at the end while the credits roll.