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    Gran Torino

    Gran Torino

    Heavy handed, sentimental trash - pandabat

    8 Points

    Viewer Rating:pandabat has rated Gran Torino rating: 2 Star

    Clint Eastwood's been slipping directorially of late. For me the "Flags Of Our Fathers"/"Letters From Iwo Jima" pairing and "Changeling" have not been of the same class as "Millionaire Baby", "A Perfect World" or the excellent "Mystic River". His latest effort, "Gran Torino", sees him playing Walt Kowolski, a Korean war veteran whose wife has just died leaving home alone with his dog, his guns and his 1972 Ford Gran Torina. He also finds himself surrounded by Asians who have moved into his neighbourhood and made it their own, a fact that Walt does not like. When one of his next door neighbours, Thao, tries to steal his Gran Torino, it triggers a chain of events that lead that to Thao doing odd jobs for Walt and his attitude thaws a bit. Thao's sister, Sue, also helps in bringing Walt in from the cold but the actions of a local Asian gang threaten everything. "Gran Torino" looks well enough and Clint can be amusing the cantankerous role but that's where the positives end. Either through bad writing and/or casting, no one is close to Clint's performance here: is it a conspiracy to make sure he looks good in his last film role? Perhaps! The film is overly heavy handed in how is handles any topic. If you like your movies with post-its, huge fingers pointing you out the way to go and characters literally explaining every nuance then you may enjoy this. For me, the story, acting, pacing and lack of any subtlety means that this is really not worth seeing. I can see what Clint was trying to do but this isn't even worthy of a made-for-tv venture and fits nicely in the extensive list of 2008/2009 movies that were frankly mediocre or worse - in this case, the latter!

    Review published on the 26 February 2009 14:05

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