'The Mule' A Review

The Mule is a drama directed by and staring Clint Eastwood about real life elderly drug mule Leo Sharp that transported thousands of pounds of cocaine for a Mexican drug cartel. The movie opens on Earl Stone(Clint Eastwood) a beloved central Illinois horticulturist tending his flowers. He goes to a flower expo, wins an award, and glad-hands with his peers at a local bar. This is happening at the same time as his daughter's wedding. We then flashfoward to his granddaughters engagement party and it is revealed that his family and his business have collapsed. Through a reference from one of his granddaughter's acquaintances he becomes a drug mule and kind of(?) befriends some of the men he works with until the DEA gets on his trail and the cartel is taken over by a meaner(?) regime.

With a few exceptions(Bradley Cooper, a handful of nameless cartel members) the performances are all wildly imbalanced and tonally uneven. Dianne Wiest and Alison Eastwood(as Stone's ex-wife and daughter respectively) for example ave huge outbursts of emotion that are not really responded to by the other actors they play off of to the point they seem to belong in a different movie. Ignacio Serricchio's performance is so underdevloped and flat its as if he is struggling simply to remember his lines. Every scene with Laurence Fishburne is in a hall way or office and every third line of his is "Ok, get it done." Eastwood himself has a few flashes of competency and charm but mostly mumbles and grumbles his way through a wild variety of actions and behaviors of his character with no real throughline or coherence. The "character's" propensity for dancing with younger woman as well as visiting prostitutes culminates in a truly egregious scene of Eastwood topless with two women a quarter his age also topless stopping just short of an out-and-out sex scene, doubly baffling and repugnant given this aspect of the "character" has no real place in the story and adds nothing to it. It is, transparently, an excuse for Eastwood, the director, to grope young attractive women. Woof.

Over the past decade Eastwood's patented one-take style of working has really deteriorated to the point his past several movies feel amateurish in their editing and especially in their performance. The story of an elderly drug mule is interesting, I suggest reading the New York Times article on which the movie is based, but The Mule is a muddled confusing mess of zero character development and a truly incompetent script. What is interesting and compelling about the true story is seemingly lost in thin characterizations and a meandering plot that touches on everything but focuses on nothing.

Compare this to this years The Old Man & The Gun and it makes you sad Robert Redford has announced his retirement and it makes you hope that Eastwood will.

Don't See It.