Touching and entertaining. Grandpa Harry knocks it out the park again

Rating: 8/10 (28 December 2010)

Clint! You just gotta love Clint. Yes it's a touch predictable at times, but there are few greater pleasures in cinema than watching mean old Clint being old and mean and still tougher than chewing a mountain of bricks while taking double calculus. There's mostly great support from some believably rough-edged young unknowns (and some cranky old ones), who are assuredly handled by Eastwood's usual unfussy directorial style, which effortlessly avoids the melodramatics that could so easily have mired such a story in less experienced hands.
Though a much smaller film, in both theme and execution, than Unforgiven, this sits perfectly as a companion piece to the former: A final deconstruction of the unstoppable vengeance-laying legend of yore, and if this is, as is rumoured, to be Clint's final stand in front of the camera, then it could not be a more perfect send-off. Full circle for both a definitive character and the career of this great screen legend. Would that some other elderly icons (I'm looking at you Sean) choose so wisely. I'm still not sure about the singing though.