Cry Macho - Movie Review

Critics Score - 3

General Audience Score - 3

Clint Eastwood has been a staple of the film industry longer than many reading this have been alive. From acting in to directing some truly fantastic films, including Best Picture winners and nominees, Clint has a legacy in film that is almost unsurpassed. But Cry Macho, the latest acting/directing effort by Mr. Eastwood that just dropped last weekend on HBO Max, rather than add to his legacy, it only serves to solidify the argument that his work took a sharp turn for the worse in his final years. With Million Dollar Baby, Changeling and American Sniper in the last couple decades, he’s proven he’s capable of producing cinema at a very high level, but Cry Macho is pedestrian storytelling at it’s finest. This film looks and feels like a product that a new director from the 80’s would bring to the table, and while Clint still has some of the Macho materials leftover from his younger years, the rest of this film mainly makes you want to Cry.

SYNOPSIS - This geriatric tale of companionship and of women half of Clint Eastwood’s age throwing themselves at him, I kid you not, begins with Mike Milo (Clint), a ranch hand back in 1979, getting let go by the owner Howard (Dwight Yokam). Despite Howard’s willingness to cut ties with Mike, he shows up a year later to explain that he’s been making Mike’s house payments for him and helping him out and now he needs a favor. He needs Mike to go to Mexico to retrieve his son who’s about thirteen years old and bring him back to Texas. Mike reluctantly agrees and heads south, before long nothing interesting is happening and Mike runs into the boys mother who tells him the boy is a monster and a thief, others have come to look for her son and couldn’t find him and she doesn’t know where he is. Mike walks around the corner and within five minutes finds her son Rafo (Eduardo Minett) at a cock fight, about to fight his rooster Macho against another. Mike convinces Rafo to come back to Texas with him and ride horses and be a ranch hand, a real cowboy, so they set out on their journey. If any of that sounds interesting, I apologize, it’s really not.

But the time they’ve reached the U.S./Mexico border, it doesn’t really matter, I could tell you literally anything else that happens and it wouldn’t spoil anything about the movie. Cry Macho feels like a forced, rushed project, and not in a passion project kind of way. Clint seems to be making movies, not for the sake of really wanting to keep telling stories he’s super passionate about, but more along the lines of just needing something to do, making movies for the sake of making them. Some of the Spanish dialogue is translated into subtitles and some isn’t for some reason. And will somebody explain to me why Clint Eastwood is being sexually propositioned by so many Spanish women that are way younger than him? While he has a couple scenes that show he’s still got some acting chops and delivers a couple laughs, the screenplay is a real problem with all the other main actors fumbling their way through formulaic dialogue that’s mostly clunky and hollow. Some of the countryside shots the cinematographer is able to capture through the film are very nice, Nomadland-esqe. But all in all there’s just not much reason to watch this film, put in and watch one of your favorite films for the hundredth time, you’ll enjoy yourself far more.

SUMMARY - This movie gets three points, one for the still macho Clint making movies into his nineties, another for some of the beautiful landscapes and the last for only wasting a little over an hour and a half of my time. This film is a far cry from what Clint has brought to the table with some of his past films, but if you decide to take the plunge, you too can Cry Macho.