Cry Macho review

CRY MACHO: 

CLINT EASTWOOD SHINES IN THIS WELL-MADE ALBEIT FORGETTABLE FILM!

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: ** ½ out of 4

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Clint Eastwood in Cry Macho

 

            Veteran Western actor, Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry franchise, Unforgiven, Gran Torino) returns to the genre in Cry Macho, the new neo-Western film starring and directed by Eastwood and based on the 1975 novel of the same name by N. Richard Nash. I’m not familiar with the book so I will not be doing comparisons to it and instead do my usual shtick by judging it as a film. 

            And as a film, Cry Macho is…okay, not terrible but far from being one of Eastwood’s best works. It’s less Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Million Dollar Baby and more along the lines of The Mule and The 15:17 to Paris where it’s just instantly forgettable. 

            The film follows Mike Milo (Eastwood), a former rodeo star who now spends his time breeding and training horses. After losing his job, Mike is hired by his former boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam-Sling Blade, Panic Room, Logan Lucky) to travel from Texas to Mexico and find his son, Rafo (Newcomer, Eduardo Minett) who lives with his mother, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola-My Best Enemy, Drama, Blue Miracle) and has turned to a life of crime by participating in cockfights with a chicken he calls Macho. 

            Being forced to take the backroads to Texas, this unlikely pair faces an unexpectedly challenging journey, during which this weary horseman discovers his own sense of redemption. 

            Overall, Cry Macho is a perfectly serviceable neo-Western drama that has some impressive cinematography and production design as well as an excellent Clint Eastwood performance, but the plot isn’t all that interesting and the pacing at times is very sluggish. It’s one of those slow-burn movies which you’ll either appreciate or get bored by. 

            There have been plenty of slow-burns in the past that kept my interest, but unlike films such as News of the World, Nomadland, or The Green Knight, Cry Macho doesn’t quite have an interesting-enough story or even that many compelling characters to warrant such a slog. I was with it enough, but there were a couple of times while watching it where I felt like I was about to doze off. 

            However, when it was interesting, it was interesting; I liked the chemistry Eastwood has with this kid he’s tasked to pick up, I dug the cockfighting sub-plot, and there was an exhilarating albeit brief car chase during the film’s climax. Unfortunately, you have to go through an equal amount of uninteresting stuff to get to those moments. 

            One of the positives I addressed was the chemistry between Eastwood and Minett, which is very strong and probably the best thing to come out of the film aside from the scenery. You got a washed-up former horseman who reluctantly agrees to go to Mexico and a kid with a rough life who participates in illegal cockfighting, both of them play their parts well and while I don’t think their chemistry is quite as powerful or moving as Eastwood and the Hmong kid from Gran Torino, it is the emotional highlight of the film. 

            The dialogue, however, is pretty bad and most of it consists of random banter and talking to make the film sound more interesting than it actually is. But they ultimately end up leaving you scratching your head thinking “What is the point of this conversation?” and Minett in particular gets some of the worst dialogue in the entire film which is unfortunate because he is trying his hardest to work with it and most of the scenes with him and Eastwood work (With a couple exceptions), had the script been written better, I think it would have greatly improved this film. 

            Cry Macho at best is a perfectly average modern Western film with charismatic performances by the leads and some nice scenery that do look great on the big screen. However, it’s one of those movies that you might enjoy as you’re watching, but you’ll likely forget about it the moment you leave the cinema or when the film ends on HBO Max.