Every trailer for a Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby) directed movie over the last decade-plus has made the film look like it’s a guaranteed Best Picture nominee.  Whether that proves to be fruition (American Sniper, Flags of Our Father) or not even close (The 15:17 to Paris, Hereafter) doesn’t affect how great the trailers are. Over the last 15 years, Eastwood-directed movies have earned hundreds of millions more combined than they would have otherwise received had they not had terrific trailers. And this is true with 2018’s The Mule. After seeing the trailer for The Mule for the first time back in early October of 2018, the film instantly vaulted to my most anticipated movie of the year. When it wasn’t screened very much before its opening, I got a little worried. Then I saw the mixed reviews start to come in. At the time of this writing, The Mule has a 62% critics square and a 74% audience score, numbers that were a little lower than I anticipated based on the trailer, but right around what I expected them to be after seeing the film.

So The Mule was flawed. From its opening scene until its ending credits, there are problems with the film. They aren’t necessary plotholes as much as they affect the flow of the movie and its overall impression. This movie is inspired by actual events more than it is a true story. There were many modifications, some of which don’t change the story’s overall trajectory, but some do. But unlike American Sniper, which will keep you thinking for days, weeks, months, and years and deserves multiple rewatches, The Mule is a film that you can undoubtedly appreciate at the moment. Still, it’s not one that you’ll likely want to watch again and won’t be one that you’ll be thinking about for days to come. It was a fine little film. While I like that Eastwood directed and starred in this movie, I feel like he does a little better these days doing one or the other. His work behind the camera is a bit more impressive than his work in front of it in the last decade, but I still enjoy seeing him in films.

Eastwood plays a horticulturist named Earl Stone, who in 2005 is doing great as a businessman specializing in daylily flowers (whatever those are). He is at the local midwest flowerers convention, where he ironically wins an award unconcerned about the Internet and the convenience, ease, and cost of purchasing flowers online. We learn that Earl is at the floral convention instead of his daughter Iris’s second marriage (Alison Eastwood – Poolhall Junkies, Absolute Power). But life is good for Earl. He prefers buying a crowd full of strangers a round of drinks instead of being there to give away his only child. He is reminded of what he is missing when the bartender asks him if he wants to buy drinks for a wedding party that he hadn’t noticed at the time. It proves to be a theme. Earl is far more interested in driving around the country to various exhibitions, conventions, and competitions than he is with his family. He also has a thriving farm back home that takes a good deal of his time and attention.

Fast-forward to 2013, and Earl’s home has foreclosed. The Internet has swept in and bankrupted his business. All of his possessions are in his beat-up Jeep, and he has nowhere to go. Promises of paying for an open bar at his granddaughter Ginny’s (What they Had, The Nun) upcoming wedding have been abandoned. The relationship with Iris is estranged and is topped by the tense relationship with his ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest – Parenthood, Hannah and Her Sisters). After Iris and Mary basically force Earl away from Ginny’s engagement party, he is approached by a friend of Ginny’s who approaches Earl about driving a product from Texas back up to the Detroit area, seeing the older man as a perfect drug mule after learning that he has a pristine driving record.

Broke and in debt, he takes the man up on his offer and drives to Texas to get his first shipment, not knowing what it is. And even if he doesn’t know that it is drugs, he must have some inclination that what he is transporting is illegal. Why else would he be paid very handsomely to drive very carefully, told he can never look at the cargo, to drop off his car at said location, and come back to it where a huge wad of cash will be waiting for him. He doesn’t seem too intimidated by the men he routinely meets within Texas, and over time he gets to know them much more than any drug mule should get to know his employer. He does half a dozen runs…the timeframe between runs isn’t exactly specified in this movie. With each successful trip, he gets recognized more and more by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (Andy Garcia – When a Man Loves a Woman, Night Falls on Manhattan), the head of the Sinaloa Cartel. They feel he could be the organization’s top mule. So he puts two men on Earl to follow his every move.

It also becomes known to the D.E.A. that huge shipments are being brought into the Detroit area regularly, and agent Jeff Moore (Bradley Cooper – American Hustle, A Star is Born) and his partner Trevino (Michael Pena – Crash, End of Watch) are put on assignment to find this high-end mule. From this point, it becomes a fairly straightforward cat and mouse movie. Only it’s not that because cat and mouse movies are usually exciting and suspenseful, and The Mule, frankly, wasn’t either of those. Honestly, I felt like this movie was a series of one-act plays with the lead characters just appearing in different settings. There was the infamous trailer scene where Earl gets pulled over by a state trooper. There are quite a few scenes of Earl disobeying the cartel’s orders by engaging with escorts at night, veering off course to have lunch at his favorite barbecue spot in the Midwest, or helping some motorists fix a flat tire. The Mule failed to follow a cohesive plan. The relationship that Earl tried to repair with his family was something that we never really cared about. In fact, I’m not sure there was a single character that we cared about, and while Eastwood’s Earl was definitely the protagonist, he wasn’t a man particularly cheered for. I didn’t care much about what happened to him. I didn’t care if he got caught or got away with it all.

There is a scene in a Waffle House near the end of the movie that puts Eastwood and Cooper onscreen for the first time. I don’t know if Eastwood felt this was necessary or if he felt like he could replicate the first of two scenes between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the classic Heat or something else. But it felt out of place and fell flat on its face. Like why would Earl purposefully put himself in the same room with the man who is being paid to capture him and put him behind bars? It made no sense. But neither did many things in The Mule, a movie that took too many liberties with a true story that might have better been served as a documentary.

At 88 years of age, Eastwood is not past his prime as a director or an actor. He should continue to direct and star, though I am uncertain if he should be the leading character in a movie he directs anymore. However, when he’s pitted against Cooper, he is clearly outmatched. And I’m not saying that because Cooper is at the top of his game right now. I’m saying that it would have been difficult for Eastwood to have a great scene with Cooper in his prime. So they are in two different leagues as actors. And they are in two different leagues as directors too. As fabulous as Cooper’s directorial debut in A Star is Born was, he doesn’t have four Best Directing Academy Award nominations. Hopefully, he will someday, but as of 2018, I think Eastwood is the best combination actor/director that we’ve ever seen though others (like Robert Redford) are close.

Regardless of how great the trailer made it out to be, there is a reason The Mule wasn’t widely screened before its release. It’s a fine idea, but it underwhelms. It has a story that seems interesting but really isn’t. That’s why so many made-up scenes were added in. Its character development is weak…especially the side characters who go from menacing to those you’d want to have over for Thanksgiving dinner over the course of just a few scenes. It puts Eastwood in a situation that would terrify anyone, but one that he seems too calm and collected for, especially for an 85-year-old man who has never been around violence before. In the end, it is not a movie that needs to be seen in the theater, and it is wrapping up a year that is falling short of steam at its finish. Though promising through the first three quarters of the year, the October-December releases have, honestly, been anything but Oscar-worthy. There are still one or two potentials remaining (Vice, If Beale Street Could Talk), but we are running out of contenders quickly. The Mule could be skipped altogether.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 7.5/10
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 7.5/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing  7/10
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 7/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
76%