Eastwood makes even the worst of characters easy to love.

Rating: 8/10 (25 June 2013)

Clint Eastwood's 'Gran Torino', his first movie in 4 years since 2004's 'Million Dollar Baby', delves into the tired life of retired Korean War veteran, Walt Kowalski, who has found himself living right next door to a family of Hmong Asians. The story explores the complications of racial boundaries, and is mainly driven by the development of relationships between the different characters more than anything else.
The film acts as a modern-age American ideology film, as Walt continuously fights to protect his own property against intruders. But his intentions quickly become misconceived as heroism by his neighbors, and he suddenly finds himself with more to care about than his own lawn. The plot of this movie relied primarily on the actions and reactions of the characters that are at odds. We see periodically through a series of harsh, embarrassing, and life-threatening events how two people who have no interest in establishing a relationship can come to caring enough to fight for each other's honor.
We start to learn a lot more about the intentions of each character in this movie through these events, and while Walt holds on to his racial grudges, he shows compassion and dignity towards the less fortunate people around him. Throughout the movie he persistently mispronounces the other characters' names, calling Thao "Toad" and his girl fancy "Yum Yum", even after they find themselves in a good standing relationship. His casual interactions with his barber reveal that it may not just be a racist grudge after all.
What I loved most about Eastwood's character in this film was that he turned a grumpy, hateful, racist old man, who would probably be viewed as an antagonist in any other movie, into a very likable and awesome main protagonist of the movie. His whole "bad ass" persona and old timer knowledge fortifies that likeabilty of his character, and really is one of the things that makes this movie so great.