Very Poor Ending

Rating: 6/10 (5 June 2011)

This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie right up to the end. But the end is not good. It stinks on ice.
For the end of the movie to work, Eastwood needs outside help. Remember what the Hmong cop told the kid at the end? He said that this time, it would be different because .... Well, that is a young cop. His fellow officers are likely to tell him not to count his chickens before they are hatched. That outside help often dries up and blows away long before it is actually useful.
Well, all through this movie situations arise which are very similar to the end scene. All through this movie, that outside help was possible. All through this movie, nobody expected that outside help. And all through this movie that outside help doesn't appear. It doesn't appear from the community at large or from anyone related to any of the victims. It doesn't even come from the victims themselves. Heck, the victims are 100% absolute perfect candidates to give that outside help, but they don't do it either.
Still, Eastwood bets everything on it. Apparently his reasoning is: If I do my part, then everybody else will do their part. He seems to be forgetting that the entire community has been unwilling to have anything to do with that outside help that he needs.
And so, the movie closes in a way that would be shameful to Dirty Harry. He had so many other options. Instead, he goes against everything his character has done in his 80 years and chooses to do something that his character would consider weak and unmanly. It wasn't a brave act. Considering what else Eastwood's character was facing, this ending shows that he is giving up.
In the movie, Eastwood says "I finish things. That's what I do." Well, he didn't finish squat with this ending. There is a darn good chance that the people Eastwood is protecting are going to be a lot worse off in the future. That outside help often disappears. Cops on Law and Order and CSI are shown having trouble with that particular kind of outside help on every other episode.
It is a stupid, stupid ending to an otherwise totally enthralling movie.
There is no satisfactory rating to be given to this movie. It was absolutely brilliant until the end. But the ending is horrible.