Cheesy and awkwardly patronizing

Rating: 3/10 (10 March 2009)

Judging from the high ratings this movie gets on IMDb, you would expect it to be great. Or at the least a bit entertaining and well thought out. Gran Torino is none of the above. It is incredibly cheesy, poorly acted (Clint does deliver, all the other actors unfortunately do not) and quite patronizing in its 'teaching' of morals.
This is probably the biggest problem with the movie: many scenes are devoted to showing how Clint comes to appreciate his Korean neighbors and how Tao learns 'hard working values', but the movie shows it in such a completely expected manner that I could have predicted the end (won't spoil) after the first half hour. The thing is: I get it OK? Old grumpy man appreciates Korean culture after having fought in (ohw what a surprise) the Korean War. Just please don't take two hours of god-awful scenes to tell this. And on top of that, don't keep spelling out the meaning of every individual scene or event that takes place; I GET IT!
I am willing to put all the bad acting (mainly the Korean actors) aside, but the patronizing messages that are explicitly iterated over and over again left me wanting to hurl.