A mess of a film, with a lot of bad parts and a lot of good parts

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2008)

A confused and sometimes infuriating film, but also one that is undoubtedly entertaining and occasionally even touching. Eastwood stars as a grizzled Korean War veteran and widower with the worst family possible. Remember the family in Million Dollar Baby, so unbelievably crass that you just wanted to hit them, as well as Paul Haggis, who created the characters? The family here is ten times worse. Clint's teenage granddaughter attends her grandmother's funeral showing cleavage and her ample rear. And then her father complains that Clint is angry about the disrespect the girl is showing his dead wife! Even more confusing, Clint's son, both of his sons, actually, are dressed in suits and ties, while their sons wear football jerseys and daughters wear revealing clothing. If the parents are dressing up, wouldn't they force the kids to dress up, too? Who designed the costumes here? Who edited it? Who wrote it? And who the Hell directed it? Little of it makes any logical sense. The main body of the story is about Clint's dealing with his neighbors, a Hmong family. He becomes closer to the family after he unwittingly saves the neighbor boy, Thao, from his gang-banging cousin. Thao had previously tried to steal Clint's prized Gran Torino, and in exchange for his crime, as well as Clint's heroics, he agrees to help Clint out with chores and odd jobs. They become friends. Note to screenwriters: the Asian kids next door won't generally hang around you if you call them "slopes" and "zipperheads" to their face, no matter how much heart you have buried under a gruff exterior. Seriously, the racial epithets flow so freely, and are so often meant as comedy, that Gran Torino is going to face some major backlash because of it. There's even a memorable sequence in the film that claims that this is the way grown men speak to each other. Political correctness is, after all, for vaginae. Movies about racists aren't necessarily a bad thing, but Gran Torino crosses the line into offensiveness. This film hasn't opened in the Twin Cities yet, where the majority of Hmong people live in the United States, but I expect a slew of letters to the editor when it sees its release. So, yeah, the film has its problems. But I did find the relationship that arises between Clint and Thao, as well as Thao's sister, Sue, quite touching (if cliché). Eastwood gives a fine performance. I wouldn't call it Oscar-worthy, but it certainly beats the crap out of his performance in Million Dollar Baby, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Its other Oscar possibility is for the title song, sung by Eastwood himself over the ending credits. It's simply awful.