MOVIE REVIEW: Gran Torino
© A.J. Malouin 2009
(Ratings: 5 by Caryl [after viewing it a second time, on The Big Screen,] and 15 by The Film Snob.)
(See our side-bar page “How Caryl & Al and The Film Snob Rate Movies”)
(2008/USA/Australia. Directed by Clint Eastwood.)
Sitting here where we sit, in the slightly rolling landscape of southeastern Michigan, we wanted to like this movie a lot more than we actually liked this movie.
Caryl & Al first saw it on a screener CD shown on a 45-inch flat-screen TV.
Caryl later saw it again, this time on The Big Screen, and found of things she liked it that she missed the first time
It’s terrific that such a high-profile movie got made in Michigan (the first of many!), and, as Clint Eastwood said in an interview, it’s terrific that a movie got made about a lead character in this demographic (Clint Eastwood is a 78-year-old white male.)
The bottom line, though, is that this movie just isn’t very good.
Our story?
A totally cranky old man named Walt Kowalski, living in Highland Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, has just buried his wife. He lives in the same house he has always lived in, even though the neighborhood has “changed” in ways he neither likes nor understands.
When a small-time gang-fight takes place on his front lawn, old man Kowalski breaks it up by threatening the combatants with a loaded rifle.
Suddenly he is a hero in the neighborhood, and his non-interaction with his “new neighbors” starts to change.
The small-time gang continues to threaten the neighborhood, however. In the end, the old man solves the problem in a way that also exorcises the demons that haunt him.
On the way to the movie’s puzzling climax, Kowalski slowly befriends a young gang member whom he catches trying to steal his mint-condition Gran Torino.
The problem is, the whole movie is appallingly average. There is not one piece of good acting in the whole piece. Actors mumble, and say out loud what’s on their mind — so that they don’t have to tell us what’s on their mind through their acting.
This is the fault of a terrible script. Beyond that, the script is just awful. The dialogue thuds of the mouths of Kowalski’s two sons at their mother’s funeral, and then thumps through the neighborhood like a mortally wounded, 5000-pound Energizer Bunny.
Kowalski’s Christ-like sacrifice toward the end of the movie comes from no place that is hinted at in earlier parts of the script.
Kowalski’s spoken racial slurs are sooooooo numerous in the movie that they become to nothing other than annoyance.
The script gives Kowalski/Eastwood the role of repeating his “make my day” scene over and over throughout “Gran Torino.” It’s a wonderful sign of a totally weak script: having an actor reprise over and over a scene for which he became famous in another movie!
The set design and filmming does not show Kowalski’s neighborhood in any manner that is at all interesting, or useful. In films like “Mystic River” and, more recently, “Doubt” we get an idea of who the characters are in the movie are just by being shown scenes of the neighborhood in which they live. In “Gran Torino” we get no similar setting of the table.
As we wrote in the beginning of this piece, we really *wanted* to like this movie better than we *did*. Caryl salvaged something of it by going to see it again on The Big Screen. The Film Snob, however, felt there was nothing to salvage.
Everyone is to be applauded for making this movie right next door to us. The next movie to come out of our neighborhood will be much better, we are sure.
(1 hr 56. Rated “R” in the USA for language throughout and some violence. In English. With Clint Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, Christopher Carley as Father Janovich, Bee Vang as Thao Vang Lor, Ahney Her as Sue Lor, Brian Haley as Mitch Kowalski, Geraldine Hughes as Karen Kowalski, Dreama Walker as Ashley Kowalski, Brian Howe as Steve Kowalski, John Carroll Lynch as Barber Martin, William Hill as Tim Kennedy, Brooke Chia Thao as Vu, Chee Thao as Grandma, Choua Kue as Youa, Scott Eastwood as Trey [as Scott Reeves,] and Xia Soua Chang as Kor Khue.)