"The thing that haunts a man the most is what he isn't ordered to do".

Rating: 10/10 (26 September 2010)

As great as Clint Eastwood was in all the films spanning his career, I have to believe that he's even greater as a director. In "Gran Torino", his Walt Kowalski could have been portrayed as one dimensional a character as the Stranger With No Name or Dirty Harry. Instead, Eastwood plays a conflicted retiree suffering the loss of his wife and the disintegration of his neighborhood while staving off the attempt of a parish priest to fulfill a promise to a dying woman. It would have been easy to convert Kowalski from a die-hard bigot to a reborn and reinvigorated Christian, but the film doesn't take that easy way out. This reluctant neighborhood hero never aspires to put aside his prejudice, but he does know the difference between right and wrong. I think that's why I admire the film so much. For justice to be truly color blind, one has to act on the impulse of what's right, not who's right. The first time I saw the film, I pretty much figured out what Kowalski was going to do. Knowing that he was dying, Walt sought out his personal peace with the Padre and insulated Thao from the chaos that was about to ensue. What I didn't count on was the measure of self sacrifice that would crystallize the character of this man who had killed in war, but had carried that haunting inside himself for a half century. Walt Kowalski would achieve justice on his terms without compromise, but with immense self sacrifice. Truly a neighborhood hero, the kind that destroys racial stereotypes instead of merely knocking them down.