Courtesy Warner Bros.
Movies
Clint Eastwood returns to the director’s chair for the first time since 2019′s Richard Jewell with Cry Macho, a filmed-in-New Mexico sort of neo-Western in which Eastwood also stars and about which the best one can say is that it probably won’t be the worst thing to happen to someone this week.
Eastwood is Mike Milo, a former ranch hand/cowboy/rodeo star who, we learn, broke his back in a bucking bronco accident some years earlier, took up with pills and booze and is now bumming out his boss Howard (Dwight Yoakam) real hard. No shit on the elderly here, but it’s almost funny that Eastwood’s Milo is fired from cowboy-ing for being chronically late rather than objectively ancient, but we go with it because Eastwood was once a badass.
That suspension of disbelief becomes harder, of course, when Milo’s former boss hires him to head into Mexico to find said boss’s teenaged son Rafo, who is apparently being abused by his mother Leta (Fernanda Urrejola) in ways not worth defining to the audience. Milo reluctantly agrees and sets off on the odyssey with his cowboy hat shining and his willingness to sleep out in the open on full display. Once in Mexico, Milo meets and then runs afoul of the young boy (a painfully wooden Eduardo Minnett) with very little difficulty; the scene wherein his unstable yet powerful mother demands sex from Eastwood just feels silly, though.
Rafo and Milo flee to trek across Mexico with Leta’s never-explained henchman not far behind. Together, our heroes meet a colorful cast of crooked cops, restauranteurs with hearts of gold, friendly and not-so-friendly folks and, like, cockfighting promoters and stuff. Minnett struggles to find balance playing against Eastwood’s gravitas while Eastwood, it seems, landed on playing his cowboy as befuddled most of the time, though he does somehow get the better of gun-toting goons and the authorities again and again.
And so it goes for what feels like too long (but isn’t; Cry Macho doesn’t even run two hours), and with only the semblance of backstory for basically every character, any attachments we might have formed don’t come. Is it on the nose for someone like Eastwood to play some old guy whose glory days seem long behind him? Maybe so, but it’s even more exhausting to watch over-the-top performances from basically every other actor (though we’ll give a shoutout to Santa Fean Pablo Paz for the back of his head’s appearance as some cop). Maybe Eastwood’s subdued appearance spurred them to try harder? And why would you bring in someone like Yoakam, who has shown he has chops, to say three things and then disappear?
The answer ultimately doesn’t matter, but it feels sad—and not in that we all age and it’s hard way, more in how Cry Macho’s little universe simply isn’t fleshed out enough. Because of that, it feels like half a movie that could have been something, and one that relies heavily on the star power of a once glorious cinema titan. Stream this one on HBO Max if you have it, but don’t hit the theater. It’s not worth it.
5
+Pretty landscapes; Pablo Paz’s head
-Half-baked; mostly bad performances
Cry Macho
Directed by Eastwood
With Eastwood, Minnett, Urrejola and Yoakam
Violet Crown and HBO Max, PG-13, 104 min.
