Critics reviews

It’s rare for a film about a Mexican drug cartel and the impossibility of the American Dream to be either disarming or funny, but Clint Eastwood has blessedly delivered one that is consistently both.

Rascally Stone — a roustabout who likes growing day lilies, driving, and doing more than flirting — recalls classical, Old Hollywood moralism. No wonder it’s been ignored by this year’s award hacks.

Compared to the tension of American Sniper or the theatrics of Sully (arguably his best film of the 2010s), The Mule feels offhand; like this year’s 15:17 to Paris, it might be accused of indulging in some of Eastwood’s worst tendencies. But there’s something there, glinting.

Characteristic of Eastwood’s finest work, this is a film about its director and star as much as it is about the guy whose life he’s depicting, a fact that gives the The Mule so much of its eerie—and, at times, vexing, confusing, off-putting, and thrilling—power.

A bizarre, brazen, and often wonderfully surprising film. . . . [Eastwood’s character is] in his way an aesthete, at one point speaking of the beauty of his flowers with a note of choked tenderness that exemplifies the pride of an artist in his oeuvre—a moment where it is hard to escape the impression that this is a deeply personal film.

The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.

It plays less like the clever action film it is than like a personal work—a movie of self-retrospection with a resonant, romantic air of regret. Even if Eastwood, who is eighty-eight, goes on to make many more films, this one feels like the closing of a very long and complex chapter in his cinematic life, and perhaps the opening of a new one.