horrible acting and awful screenplay makes worst Eastwood movie ever...

Rating: 1/10 (7 September 2009)

with all the positive reviews and massive gross income this movie received at the box office, i thought this movie was going to be good... i would have settled for decent. but this movie is straight-out bad. fans who responded well to this film must be major Eastwood fans because i seriously cannot believe anyone would rate this movie so high.
let me just say that this movie didn't get nominated for any academy awards for a reason. looking at its award accomplishments, this film did not garner much attention, only being nominated for small categories. the only one notable was the national board of review, and to think it honored Clint Eastwood as best actor and Nick Schenk for best screenplay is beyond my comprehension.
what truly ruined this movie was the horrible acting! i truly cannot believe that Clint as a director could allow such amateurs to star in his movie that had so much potential. i'm pretty sure if you read others' comments, you would get a feel of how bad i'm talking about. but for an Eastwood movie? WHY CLINT, WHY? i mean even Clint himself was forced and stiff, trying way too hard to be a tough and macho racist that it didn't work at times. THE worst actors to me are the two main Hmong characters, Thao and his sister. oh my goodness. what happened to them? as an Asian-American watching this movie, i was truly shocked at their utterly poor acting skills, as if Clint picked them at random off the street or as if they were part of his family or something. i know for a fact that i would have done a better job playing these characters, and i'm not joking either. in a nutshell, the acting was so unbelievable.... the way they delivered their lines and their lack of facial expression.
another horrible factor to this film is the awful screen writing. Nick Schenk tries way too hard to make this movie bad-ass that every single line from a character contains some derogatory name-calling. honestly, people don't call each other names as often as this. and to have Eastwood's character sacrifice his life at the end all because the Hmong family didn't want to tell the police that Thao's sister got raped is just plain dumb. what made it worse was that supposedly, Hmong keep things very private but yet witnesses who saw the murder blabbed to the police faster than the speed of light. and you would think those gangsters who shot him would run away or try to hide his body but instead they stay there at the scene of the crime, pretty much waiting to be arrested by the police. let's get real here people.
all in all, lack of character development from 99% of the characters and crappy screen writing made this film clearly Eastwood's worst and most forgettable movie, period.