104 min | PG-13 | September 17, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A washed-up rodeo star takes a job retrieving a rich man’s son from Mexico City and hauling him back across the border. The kid would rather keep his fighting rooster. Clint Eastwood, ninety-one years old, ambles through a movie that has nowhere to be.
Mike Milo is a broken-down horse trainer who once rode rodeo and now drinks his days away. His old boss calls in a favor and sends him to Mexico to bring back a teenage son the man abandoned years ago. Mike finds the boy, Rafo, living rough and fixated on his rooster named Macho. The journey north is supposed to be the plot. The real subject is an old man teaching a young one that toughness is a story men tell to cover their wounds.
Clint Eastwood plays Mike with a slow, frayed stillness that suits a man running out of road. He underplays everything. The famous squint now reads as fatigue rather than menace. Eduardo Minett plays Rafo with a brittle swagger that the film slowly strips away. Natalia Traven plays Marta, a cantina owner who feeds the travelers and draws Mike out, and she gives the warmest performance in the picture. Dwight Yoakam plays Howard Polk, the absent father, with a smiling self-interest that explains everything about the boy.
Eastwood directs from a script by Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash, working a story Nash wrote decades ago. The pacing is patient to the point of drift. Cinematographer Ben Davis shoots the Mexican countryside in flat, dusty afternoon light that refuses postcard prettiness. The animal scenes are staged plainly, with Eastwood letting the camera sit on the horses and the rooster instead of cutting around them. The score stays sparse and lets long stretches of road play in near silence.
This is minor, unhurried Eastwood, a small fable about masculinity told by the man who once defined its movie version. Mike teaches Rafo to break horses and to stop performing hardness. Eastwood the director uses Eastwood the icon as the argument. The film asks almost nothing of the audience and delivers a gentle, predictable comfort that knows exactly what it is.