This movie is truly terrible. It has nothing new to say; the acting is bad; the filmcraft on display is borderline inept.

This is a film aimed straight at the heart of Middle American Baby Boomers and Silent Generations, feeding their fears and prejudices by giving them a safe place to be racist in the dark for two hours.

It’s a film starring a 90-year-old protagonist who throws around words like “Negro” and “Dyke”– but don’t worry, it’s all in good fun and the people he speaks those obscenities to give him a pass. A film with a protagonist who jokes about the Hispanic day laborers at his greenhouse being deported because of the music they listen to; a protagonist who curses the “damned internet” for stealing his livelihood.

He’s estranged from his family, you see, because he was too busy partying at horticulture conferences in a bowtie to attend his only daughter’s wedding, but can’t seem to understand why she and his ex-wife refuse to be in the same room with him. It’s all right, though, because his ex-wife and daughter are harpie shrews who want to ruin his relationship with his granddaughter, the only member of the family naive enough to expect anything but disappointment from him (HE MISSED HIS DAUGHTER’S WEDDING BECAUSE HE DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE A MIXER AT A HORTICULTURE CONFERENCE).

Clint Eastwood looks and emanates 90-year-old crustiness straight from his core, with pants pulled up to his chest, listening to the tiredest, most played-out music (Ain’t That a Kick in the Head and On the Road Again, they just don’t make music like they used to, you know?), very obviously driving under the speed limit in the left lane of a highway in his beat up old truck, but somehow every woman gazes at him with barely-restrained lust– and indeed, he manages not one but TWO threesomes in this film without breaking a hip or dying of a heart attack mid-coitus.

Acting-wise, Clint Eastwood is Clint Eastwood as described above. Bradley Cooper, Michael Pena, and Laurence Fishburn are wandering through playing DEA agents. Pena and Fishburn are actually just listed as “DEA Agent” on the Mule’s IMDB page, and I honestly don’t remember if they had real names.

Now securely in his auteur phase, Bradley Cooper is rapidly becoming one of my least favorite actors. Without a strong director to give him notes, he alternates between boring good-guy blandness and smarmy assholishness, neither of which are all that interesting.

The cartel that Eastwood runs drugs for is populated mostly with C-actors from Fast & Furious films and basic cable dramas like Sons of Anarchy. I’m not sure they were even given a script, just told to play different types of Hispanic stereotypes. They’re led by Andy Garcia, injecting some needed fun into the movie– but alas, he’s dead before you know it because God forbid we have fun in this fucking movie.

The trio of female actors with anything resembling a character– that is, not just there to serve as a sex object for Clint Eastwood to writhe his wrinkled body upon– struggle to project any empathy into their characters but it’s a real no-win scenario. Dianne West as his ex-wife coughs once, gets cancer and dies, but manages to forgive him because he gives her a few sips from a juice box before she croaks.

His daughter is played by his real daughter, Alison Eastwood, and she too forgives him after 2 hours of complete scorn, but I’m not really sure why. He spends a few days with the family before the DEA finally catches up with him and arrests him. The family sits behind him in solidarity while he interrupts his lawyer’s extremely valid argument for leniency (because he’s a confused old man) and loudly pleads guilty to be sent away to prison for whatever remains of his lifespan. Even at the end, he’d rather be locked up and growing flowers in the prison garden than putting one iota of effort into his family life. They somehow support this, though, and promise to visit him “whenever they can”.

The level of filmmaking craft on display here is embarrassingly amateur. Like American Sniper and most of Eastwood’s other films in the last two decades, this movie is flat and dull as if someone just put a camera on a tripod and walked away. Clint Eastwood’s filmmaking ethos seems to be in direct opposition to mine, and although he’s made visually and technically impressive movies in the distant past– The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bridges of Madison County leap to mind– he’s just not contributing anything interesting to the artform anymore. Like an elderly man who needs his license taken away because it’s not safe for him to drive anymore, Clint Eastwood needs his director’s license revoked.

Here’s the crazy thing. The people that like this movie are most likely to be the kinds of people that support a giant wall being built between Mexico and the United States. This movie completely invalidates that strategy in fighting the drug war. When brown people can no longer smuggle drugs, this movie posits, it will be our feeble racist grandparents who take up the helm.

1/24/2019