Longtime Clint Eastwood producer Robert Lorenz, after a directing debut on TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/10/trouble-with-curve-2012.html), goes out on his own with (what else?) a Clint Eastwood movie . . . but without Clint Eastwood; instead, Liam Neeson gets the call. Sixth-nine to Eastwood’s ninety-one, how often can Liam be considered the younger choice these days?* Set at his failing ranch near the Mexican border, Neeson’s Vietnam vet runs straight into a vicious gang from a drug cartel on the hunt for a mother & son. But when Mom dies in a firefight, Neeson feels duty-bound to honor her dying wish and get the resentful kid to relatives in Chicago. In debt up to his ears and with his smalltime ranch just burnt to the ground, what’s he got to go back to? The pair, only deeper in shit after killing the brother of the top enforcer, go on the lam, heading Northeast pursued by the law (including his worried daughter) and by the cartel mob, traveling in his expiring pickup truck with his (narratively expendable) dog. The script doesn’t always succeed in having us swallow the next story beat, but the film grows more effective (and affective) as it goes along. And Lorenz (or one of his co-writers) pulls off a few first-rate set pieces (an encounter with a corrupt highway patrolman; a quick, finessed buy at a gun shop, plus the expected thaw between man & child) without making a meal of them. Standard stuff, but not a bad standard.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Eastwood’s own CRY MACHO/’21, out later the same year, with similar story elements, a similar running time, and Eastwood in a similar/familiar Eastwood role, earned little more than half this film’s modest gross. Actually, the Eastwood pic this most recalls is A PERFECT WORLD/’93, a film that predates Lorenz’s involvement with Clint by a decade. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/04/cry-macho-2021.html
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