The Mule (2018)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Earl Stone, a man in his eighties, is broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive. Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he's just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel. He does so well that his cargo increases exponentially, and Earl hit the radar of hard-charging DEA agent Colin Bates.
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What critics compared The Mule to
There’s a late-film Waffle House confrontation between Earl and Cooper’s lawman that, if you squint, seems to be echoing a similar set-up from Michael Mann’s Heat.
Just as The Mule brilliantly inverts the premise of the TV series Breaking Bad – involvement with the drug business doesn’t turn Earl into a demonic bad guy like Walter White – it also casually replays, ironically and far less grandiloquently, the meeting of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995): here, in a fast food joint, Earl even manages to give Colin (Bradley Cooper), the cop on his tail, some wise work/life balance advice.
While jocular about crime (DEA drug busts are arranged for media PR), it’s not really a crime movie, certainly not in that puerile way of Michael Mann neo-noirs ( Heat , Public Enemies ) reliant on remote-control TV narrative and armchair nihilism.
Drowning in regret, the old satyr Earl is given to talking about the importance of family life to whoever will listenincluding Cooper’s agent, whom he buttonholes in a scene that is something like the Pacino–De Niro encounter in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), set in a Midwestern Waffle Housethough Eastwood doesn’t go so far as to imagine what happy everyday family life might actually look like.
Critics will misread the movie because of Eastwood’s politics, just as they misread American Sniper , Gran Torino , and Eastwood movies all the way back to Dirty Harry .
Yet in the same breath, Earl isn’t spiteful in the same way as Eastwood’s Walt in Gran Torino .
It’s not quite fair to say that what annoys me so much about Gran Torino and The Mule, both of which both occupy the aforementioned and increasingly crowded field of Eastwood-movies-about-Eastwood, is how they combine to affix their own asterisk to Unforgiven ’s very title.
Eastwood isn’t playing himself in “The Mule” — far from it — but it’s hard not to appreciate, and be moved by, the film’s many echoes for the filmmaker, acting for the first time in one of his own since 2008′s similarly self-reflective “Gran Torino.”
Clint Eastwood’s first movie as both lead actor and director since 2008’s “Gran Torino,” “The Mule,” is an epic debacle.
In the 10 years since Clint Eastwood last starred in one of his own films, the de facto movie-star farewell Gran Torino , he’s embarked upon one of the most adventurous, experimental, and prolific periods of his directing career.
“Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” is the second movie within a year to feature that slur prominently; the other, Clint Eastwood’s “ The Mule ,” also displays the devastating real-world oppressions that Mexicans endure as a result of white Americans’ racist attitudes.