The Mule

The Mule is a beautiful, troubling film. It is a pearl formed around a grit of unease in the oyster of our nostalgia.

As Earl, Clint Eastwood is so believable and such a charming curmudgeon that when the cops from the Federal Drug Administration led by Bradley Cooper turn the tables, you don’t want them to.

A modest but reasonably suspenseful and abidingly eerie portrait of the aged white American male trying vainly to forestall rejection and irrelevance.

The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.

Poorly written and with hardly any thrills, The Mule disappointingly depends on the amiability of Eastwood’s character, whose extreme social ineptness is far beyond the redeeming powers of star power.

An uncomfortable fit for the Time's Up era.

The embarrassing drama — offensive, clunky, poorly written — sullies Eastwood’s storied legacy, and makes great actors such as Bradley Cooper and Dianne Wiest come off like amateurs.

Clint at his best in a smart, poignant, funny tale of humanity and slow burn suspense deserving of Oscar nods. His character and the story are not racist (if you paid attention to such idiotic controversy) but generational colloquial if viewed correctly. Worthless critics pc herd jackasses, dumb diversity handout losers, sheep Academy hypocrites all be damned!

When I grow up, I want to be Clint Eastwood; pushing 90 and still directing movies, and good ones at that. Eastwood both stars and directs this film. It's a movie that at times is funny, because how can a movie about a 90-year-old drug mule navigating the world of the cartel, the internet and political correctness not be?. At other times it's emotionally hard-hitting, especially when it comes to his family life, and that's where the real lessons of the movie lay. Ultimately this is a movie about the importance of family, redemption, even for late bloomers, like our 90-year-old drug mule

+Great cast +Quality production -Weak screenplay -Concept falls flat next to its contemporaries I certainly enjoyed watching Eastwood's karaoke road trip but we simply don't spend enough time with earl before his business dissolves to feel truly invested in his choices and the subsequent situations presented throughout the film and so later and so we are left simply watching the predictable events occur in sequence... Don't get me wrong its well produced and entertaining yet suffers from being painfully average at every page turn. Moments like the multiple cop 'stop and search' feel completely one dimensional and you can hear the writers voice and not the characters... The Mule is an interesting idea executed well enough to work on film but the push to feel for earls lost family relationship just didn't quite work for me emotionally one way or another.... Def worth a look if you are an Eastwood fan though.

The idea is not bad and it starts out somewhat promising but it gets boring and predictable somewhere in the middle. The acting is ok but it's just a **** script.

I'm pretty sure this entire movie was just an excuse for Clunt Eastwood to say a bunch of racial slurs over the course of an hour. The acting was thin, the story was thin, there was no meat on this bone - the story just wasn't interesting. Eastwood is pretty far past his prime and should probably call it quits before he croaks on set.