A banal display of gimmickery and staggeringly amateurish acting.

Rating: 1/10 (26 January 2009)

"Relax zipperhead, I'm not going to shoot you", grumped Harry the Ole Fart to Billy the karate Kid. "I may not be the most pleasant man that walks the Earth, you zip face, fish head, you gook...grunthhhhggghhh....."
Enough already!
Seriously, this film's so bad it's not even funny.
Here's the whole ordeal in a nutshell:
Over the top racist old war vet is grumpy. Over the top racist old war vet is slightly less grumpy. Over the top racist old war vet develops a heart. Some injustice, unfathomable plot twist. To everyone's ill concealed embarrassment, Clint barks a tune during the credits -The end-
Mix in some truly pathetic acting by a cast clearly let in on a sympathy vote, the worst clichés gathered from Alan Smithee's collective works, The Ultimate Anthology of Prosthetic Plot Points, and you get this yard sale of banality which is Gran Torino.
If you like your drama spoon fed to you with a predictability factor that would even make a soap screenwriter blush and if you can stand Eastwood doing poor grizzly imitation while impersonating a fossilized plank of pre-Cambrian wood throughout an entire film, I guess this movie is for you.
But if you're still going for something slightly original, convincing or otherwise entertaining , I can only recommend a dozen of other films that are actually worth their viewing.
Go see 'The Usual Suspects' if you never got around to see it. 'Big Fish', 'Lost in Translation', 'Funny Games', 'Ground Hog Day', 'Michael Clayton' or 'The Escapist'. And bloody shame on all those professional movie critics. I mean, surely they must have HBO so they can compare this shameful dross to for instance 'The Wire' and conclude that which was actually really made for TV, is light years ahead of this straight- to-DVD clunker.
Gran Torino, a score of 8.4 and a #85 place in the IMDb top 250 list.
What a joke!
4.5/10