Certification. 15
Running Time. 1 hour 56 mins
Director. Clint Eastwood
Cast. Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia, Michael Peña, Dianne Wiest.
Rating. 61%
Review.
In response to a belief that film production companies routinely wasted finances on large productions, Clint Eastwood set up his own production company, The Malpaso Company in 1967. After supporting a number of Don Siegel films - Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules For Sister Sara and The Beguiled - The Malpaso Company financed Clint Eastwood's first venture behind the camera lens in 1971, the thriller Play Misty For Me.
In 1992, Clint Eastwood starred in and directed Unforgiven, his 16th feature-length film as a director. By this point in time, it was all too apparent that Eastwood was, indeed, an accomplished storyteller and Unforgiven was rightly hailed as an autumnal masterpiece in Eastwood's career. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 65th Academy Awards ceremony.
But in the 32 years since Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has directed a further 24 films, many of which have rivalled Unforgiven - including A Perfect World, The Bridges Of Madison County, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino.
In The Mule, Eastwood casts himself as Earl Stone, a 90-year-old horticulturist who hits hard times and starts running drugs for a Mexican cartel to make ends meet. As the DEA agents close in on him, Earl grapples with a life spent neglecting his family and wondering if it’s not too late to make amends.
The film is based on The New York Times article ‘There's A True Story Behind 'The Mule': The Sinaloa Cartel’s 90-year-old Drug Mule’ by Sam Dolnick, which recounts the true story of Leo Sharp, a World War II veteran in his eighties, who became the world’s oldest and most prolific drug mule for the Sinaloa Cartel. Reuniting with Gran Torino screenwriter Nick Schenk, Eastwood once again portrays a man staring down death and trying to figure out what really matters.
The film is populated with an array of ill-defined supporting characters. Bradley Cooper, Michael Peña and Laurence Fishburne as a trio of thinly sketched DEA agents and Diane Wiest, Alison Eastwood and Taissa Farmiga as estranged female family members. The other characters are almost insultingly flat, which is most troubling when it comes to the Latino characters, many of whom are little more than anonymous, reductive stereotypes.
A laconic road movie, for much of the film The Mule sees Earl driving past weather-beaten billboards, mumbling along to ‘Ain’t That A Kick In The Head’ and dining in America’s finest Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Eastwood’s reflective tone as an 88-year-old director at the time is heavily felt throughout, which made The Mule for me, one of his more affecting experiences.
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