Overly Didactic and Not Terribly Realistic

Rating: 5/10 (27 July 2009)

I'm from the industrial Midwest, and I've known a lot of Walt Kowalskis. Grizzled, white ethnic old-timers who are not PC, whose cars are their first love, and who bemoan the loss of "their" neighborhoods, and "their" city. I've also known a fair number of kids like Thao, Hmong-American kids trying to make it in a world their parents do not understand. I've known neighborhoods like Walt's: neighborhoods in transition that show signs of decay, but are still lived in and tended to by hard working old timers like Walt and their hard-working immigrant neighbors, whom they don't understand and paint with a broad brush as "the other." I was excited to watch Gran Torino because of the rave reviews and its portrayal of this world of which I am so familiar. Sadly, while I appreciated the premise, and was happy to see so many Hmong actors in Hmong roles (rather than "professional" non-Hmong Asian actors playing these roles), the movie came up short. I found the dialogue and characters to lack credibility, and the plot too cliché-ridden to be taken seriously.
The theme of death and rebirth, brought to us mainly through the fraught relationship of Walt and the young priest, had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer(Did Walt HAVE to come to rest in a Christ-like pose after the shooting in the last scene?! Puh-leeeze.) The "death-as-sad-and-happy" thing just never really connected with the larger message of the movie of "learning to love thy neighbor."
I will cite one example of a relatively minor scene that illustrates this movie's larger problems: In real life, white boys who try to be "down with the 'hood," don't say "it's all good, bro!" to some gangbanger they don't know after said gangbanger hits on their girlfriend. Maybe in a movie like "Strait Outta Malibu" could that scene have worked, but in this context it was ridiculous and totally not-believable. This seemingly minor miscue threw so much of the movie off, because we're forced to conclude from it that Sue's boyfriend is mentally ill, and if that's the case, what does that say about Sue herself, who is one the most important drivers of the plot? Overall, this film suffers from too many cliché characters and too many cliché plot points to really be anything more than an average movie. Which is a shame, because it could have been so much more, and was a great opportunity for the wider world to get to know the Hmong people and their story.