Clint has been refining his gruff curmudgeon with a heart of gold screen persona for quite a while now, and here gives us a full helping of nothing but as Walt Kowalski, a widowed Korean war veteran besieged by a whole menagerie of humanity to snarl disbelieving disgust at, from his son's vampirically self-serving family to babbling Orientals, street hoodlums, feckless young people and the presumptiously intrusive naive local priest. This is all well and good, as no-one does a grumpy old sod quite like Clint does, and it works nicely for laughs to line them up and have them knocked down with his Lurch-like groans.Then, just as in Million Dollar Baby, he's forced to come out of his shell through external circumstance and the persistent attentions of an idealistic youngster, respectively in this case a gang making the mistake of encroaching on his peace and quiet and his Hmong (roughly, Vietnamese) neighbours' perky daughter. So he's reeled in to rejoin the rest of humanity, although the script gamely tries to maintain that he's still the same old git by not letting him ease up on the racial slur overbombing in every other sentence. But then his illness is introduced, there's a flash of the vigilante fury of old and we're well on the way to a certain sticky end.
Frequently, the script can think of no more subtle way to have Walt voice his dismay than talking to himself. Some of the supporting actors seem to have been picked more for their authentic backgrounds than required contribution or ability to act, and the depiction of the punk-ass gang that starts terrorising his neighbours is even more irritatingly cartoonish. But Eastwood is such a natural fit for the elegiac elements of a man reluctantly re-exposing his humanity, and the moments where his spiky bluff is called to comic effect, that it's tempting to forgive a lot of these glaring weaknesses.
6/10
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