Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood) is an aging rodeo star and horse breeder living out his sunset years in rural Texas.  After a year into his forced retirement, Mike is visited by his old boss, Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam), who asks Mike to travel down to Mexico and rescue his son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), from his abusive mother (Fernanda Urrejola).  Mike agrees and after locating the teen, the two form an unexpected and indelible bond on their journey North. 

Clint Eastwood stars and directs Cry Macho for Warner Bros., an attempt at a thoughtful western and the latest installment of a series of films that finds the icon reflecting on his storied life and career.  His direction is very straightforward and while there is nothing really inventive about his camera placements or his framing, there is not really a need for those tricks in this rather cut and dry film.  Eastwood knows what he wants, and with a career as enduring as his, he knows how to get it and move on with the day. 

Unfortunately, Eastwood has returned to a script penned by Nick Schenk which the only bright thing there is to say is that Cry Macho is slightly – and ever, ever so slightly – more mature than his previous effort, The Mule (2018).  Schenk’s writing style continues to be absolutely insufferable and you can tell he thinks he is far more clever than he actually is.  In a scene which the irony is clearly lost on its writer, Mike tells Rafo that he needs to watch himself in Texas as they don’t like all that macho talk, only for the script to double down on that manufactured bravado the characters all hide behind – Mike included.   

No one is spared from the elementary pen of Schenk, but the worst victim of his writing would be Dwight Yoakam who is regulated as nothing more than an exposition machine.  Yoakam’s performance can be equated to reading his lines off of cue cards, but it is hard to blame the actor entirely when his character has nothing at all to bite in to.  It is not even very interesting exposition Yoakam gets to deliver: a dead wife and kid, addiction to pills and alcohol – with nothing but theses derivative tropes to work with, it is easy to forgive the actor for phoning in his performance.  

Eastwood himself gives a rather still performance, too, even by his own standards.  Age is clearly catching up to him as his lips fade back to emphasize the Eastwood sneer even more.  While it is an achievement for sure to be acting in a leading role and directing feature films at his age, the hunched and lumbering pace Mike moves at is like that of a tired circus animal one season away from retirement. The sparse scenes of action are a far cry from Eastwood in his younger, more trigger-happy years and watching him throw some punches or get jostled around on screen is more melancholic than anything.  There is a scene early on when the police breakup a chicken fight that, had this film been made in 1988 when originally attached to Eastwood, would have ended in a brutal shootout, but instead is resolved by a fade to black here in 2021.  Still though, he is playing the familiar character of the stranger that rides into town, but instead of raining hellfire down on the bandits that have taken over the studio backlot, in Cry Macho he finds himself the caretaker of the town performing good deeds and assisting with their livestock. 

Opposite these scenes of lite violence are multiple beautiful younger women practically throwing themselves at Mike.  To Schenk’s credit, he is more restrained here than he was in 2018, opting not to have the three hippie girls from the border sleep with Mike, but it still all seems so artificial, and it really begs to question are these films meant to reconcile with Eastwood’s actions as a younger man, or relive them?  The answer will leave you either confused or disgusted, respectively, at the purpose of these late-career self-insertion pieces. 

The real star of the film is Eduardo Minett as the troubled youth at the center of this all.  In his feature debut with a history in television, he brings a lot of talent to the screen.  He is bogged down by Schnek’s dialogue, but his presence matches Eastwood’s and compliments it greatly as he takes on a more bold and active role not so dissimilar to the brash act first, think later spark we have expected more from The Man with No Name. 

Minett’s character is greatly mishandled, being referred to by his mother as a wild animal that belongs in the gutter, it can’t be farther from the truth.  Maybe it was the mother trying to scare Mike off from pursuing her son, but Rafo places his trust in Mike without much hesitation at all.  It leads to a lack of narrative tension as the two are on the road.  A smarter script would have built up this relationship more and could have leveraged it so later in the film when Rafo begins to break horses it would have a more profound impact on the story.  Ultimately, though, the script gets really bogged down in the second act as our duo goes around shaking hands and kissing babies with nothing much else to do for the entirely too long 104-minute run time. 

Cry Macho is well enough put together to keep us watching, but there is not much else to it at all.  Eastwood’s direction carries the film, but this character that seems to be a shadow of himself needs to be retired sooner than later.  He just can’t keep up anymore in the rough and tumble world.  Maybe with better writing it would not be so glaringly obvious, but with Schneck penning the scripts, there is no nuance and nothing to say other than perhaps some more clumsily setup and immature jokes.