Cry Macho

CRY MACHO (Clint Eastwood, USA, 2021, 2)

Risible from beginning to end unfortunately. Watching a 90-year-old man play a rodeo-star turned cowboy bounty-hunter is as painful an experience as watching a 55-year-old man fight mixed martial arts.

The script is one tortured contrivance after another — the very fact that Dwight Yoakam hires a 90-year-old man to go into Mexico and kidnap his estranged son; how quickly Eastwood finds both a family home and a 13-year-old boy based on only a 6-year-old’s picture; his finding which particular cockfight in Mexico City, a city of 20 million people, the boy is at; that a Texas rodeo star would speak sign language but not Spanish; the equally script-convenient variable competences of the Mexican police and Clint’s Spanish. And let’s just say CRY MACHO has the most ridiculous film climax involving a chicken since KILLER JOE.

The two lead performances are both very bad. Eduardo Minett plays the tween quarry and he can barely exist on camera but he does carefully recite every line correctly. As for Eastwood, I get that he’s deliberately playing a shadow of his formal self. But he’s just too physically limited even to do that, at least in the manner he does here. Howard Hawks gradually debilitated Robert Mitchum and John Wayne during the course of EL DORADO. Instead, Eastwood directs himself taming a wild horse. Only, in the film’s low point, most of the scene is in long shot, intercut with close-in shots of Eastwood moving up and down without a horse in the frame. That’s the stuff of Ed Wood.