The Mule Review

Clint Eastwood is back in town with his second directorial feature of the year. His first movie of the year was "The 15:17 to Paris," the movie about the two Americans who stopped a terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train. While that movie looked really interesting and the story it's based on is truly inspiring, I actually never saw it because the reviews were pretty sour. It earned a 24 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the user score not being a whole lot better at 39 percent. This overall distaste led to a very mediocre box office run, earning just $36.3 million domestically after a $12.6 million start. That was Eastwood's weakest outing since 2010 when "Hereafter" made just $32.7 million. It even made less than "J. Edgar" ($37.3 million) and "Jersey Boys" ($47.0 million), which have become two forgotten about Clint Eastwood movies. And of course it made a whole heck of a lot less than "Sully" ($125.1 million) and "American Sniper" ($350.1 million). So after a disappointing outing, Eastwood is looking to get on his feet again with "The Mule," which is already off to a good start, having opened in second place this past weekend with $17.5 million and is set to play well over the holidays as it provides some counter-programming to our bigger blockbusters this month.

Similar to pretty much all of his recent movies he's directed, "The Mule" is also based on a true story and it's a rather fascinating one at that. Sure, the general concept is not that unique as it's yet another drug trafficking sort of movie that we've seen a lot of recently, with "American Made" and "White Boy Rick" being two examples. And yeah, all of these movies have pretty much the same structure. A person without a ton of money gets caught up in the wrong crowd and gets greedy as they see how much money they can in the drug business. And of course they learn the hard way that this is the wrong business to get involved in, which usually ends up with them getting arrested or killed. These never have a happy ending. However, what makes "The Mule" a bit unique is that it involves a 90-year-old man named Leo Sharp, who had no prior criminal record. He was married with children and grandchildren, he was a war veteran, and he had a fairly successful day-lily business that he had spent most of his life working on. So how does a normal, successful family man like this randomly get involved in the drug business as a drug mule? I mean, can you imagine waking up one day to learn that your grandpa has been driving as a drug mule for over a decade? That would be crazy!

The semi-unfortunate thing for me is that my curiosity as to exactly why Leo Sharp got into this will never fully be satisfied. That's because he never really revealed much about why he did what he did or even exactly how he got started, which makes adapting his story into a movie a bit of a tricky prospect. The movie is based on a New York Times article that I have linked right there and Sam Dolnick, the journalist who wrote the article, describes in a separate article that despite his best efforts of trying to get all the details hammered out, he couldn't quite crack it. He mentioned that he had his theories, but as a journalist he could only write the facts as opposed to reporting on theories. Now the article itself was written in 2014 and immediately got national attention due to how crazy of a story it was. The rights to the article were immediately sold in 2014, but it wasn't until January of this year when Clint Eastwood was officially brought on as the director. Now I don't know if it was Clint Eastwood or screenwriter Nick Schenk who made the final decisions on how exactly to go about this. But regardless of that, the final decision was to not tell Leo Sharp's story directly, but to create a fictional movie that was based on his story.

I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this, but I suppose I understand the reasoning here. If Leo Sharp wasn't willing to reveal how or why he got into this, then there had to be a lot of fiction that filled in the gaps. And if that was the case, then why not make the whole thing fiction? So this ends up not being the story of Leo Sharp directly, but rather the story of Earl Stone, a fictional old man played by Clint Eastwood, who is loosely based on Leo Sharp. I didn't realize this was the case at first. But I was highly suspicious that something was going on since the movie opens in 2005, then rather quickly jumps forward 12 years to 2017. From then on, a timeline of events is not discussed at all. While I didn't read the article before watching the movie, I knew that the article was published in 2014 and I was pretty sure I remembered beforehand that Leo Sharp had been a drug mule for at least a decade. So if Clint Eastwood's character of Earl Stone started driving in 2017, how does this all fit into the timeline? I decided to watch and enjoy, but I was definitely curious to figure out the actual facts. Discovering that Clint Eastwood took a fictional approach made everything make sense, even though it was still a bit confusing as the movie advertises this as a true story.

But OK. Accepting this fact means that we have to take a "Breaking Bad" or "Ozark" approach to this, two fictional TV shows revolving around family men that get involved in the drug business. And I can get on board with that, so long as the movie itself is intriguing. And it's decent enough. Not only is Clint Eastwood directing this movie, but he also decided to step into the lead role, making it the first acting job that he's done since 2012's "Trouble with the Curve," not counting his brief cameo in "American Sniper." It's also the first time he's starred in a movie that he's also directed since "Gran Torino" in 2008. Clint Eastwood definitely turns this character into his own. I don't think he even ever attempted to become Leo Sharp. Rather his fictional character of Earl Stone feels very much like a Clint Eastwood role as he seems to have a whole lot of fun acting as a gruff, grumpy old man, taking every shot he can at the internet and other modern technologies. How Earl Stone actually gets into this business feels a bit rushed, but once he's in there, Eastwood also has a lot of fun acting as this carefree old man who isn't at all afraid of any of these young drug cartel people, making for a lot of genuinely humorous moments as the cartel people tried to get serious with him.

What I do like about this movie is that, even though it isn't the actual story of Leo Sharp, the story that Clint Eastwood does tell is a surprisingly emotional one. One thing that the article doesn't touch on much at all is Leo Sharp's family. Sam Dolnick mentioned in his article that he put a lot of effort into learning all he can about Leo Sharp, but I didn't see much attempt of contacting his family. I don't know if that was an option, but it seems to be an angle that the article ignores. I also don't think that Eastwood put much effort into learning about his family because he had other ideas for the family of Earl Stone. He made him a man who focused way too much on his work as a day-lily enthusiast who didn't spend enough time taking care of his family. He ends up divorced and completely estranged from his daughter, who is played by Clint Eastwood's actual daughter Alison Eastwood. Father and daughter both do a great job of giving us a fascinating family dynamic in the movie while Dianne West also adds a lot as Earl's ex-wife, as does Taissa Farmiga as the granddaughter. I found myself really caring about this broken family and I think there were some excellent character arcs with all four of them that made this a solid, touching movie.

The other angle that I liked was the angle of the D.E.A. agents trying to hunt this guy down. In real life I believe they were clued in beforehand that the guy they were searching for was an older man, but in this movie that fact was a complete mystery. Bradley Cooper and Michael Pena play the two agents on the case, with Laurence Fishburne as their boss, and the three of them make for a good trio of agents on the case. I enjoyed watching them try to solve this mystery as they initially search for your more traditional drug mule, not knowing that their real target is someone who they are not expecting at all, making it really easy for Clint Eastwood to casually walk by them and other officers or even have a conversation. I will say that after reading up on the story afterwards, how this all turned out is some really fascinating drama that could've made for an intense movie, but all of that was cut out as Eastwood chose to focus more on the story of this man and his family dynamics rather than telling the story of the drug cartel itself. I suppose I can understand and appreciate that, but it still doesn't change the fact that I was a little baffled when I learned that there was a whole lot more story to this story that wasn't told. It could've made the movie even better.

In summing this whole thing up, it's interesting to note that this movie had a really quick turnaround from when Eastwood was brought on to when the movie was filmed and finished. As I said, it was January of this year that Eastwood was announced as director. The movie started filming in June. Now it's December and the whole thing is done and in theaters. This makes me believe that there wasn't a whole lot of time and effort put into this movie on Eastwood's part. It's as if this was more of a side project for him to keep him busy until he finds something more interesting to devote more time to. Suddenly when you think about it from those terms, this whole thing makes sense. This movie could have been big. It could've been super intense and super gritty, given the subject matter. It could've been the type of movie that sticks with you long after leave the theater. But it's not really any of those. It's just kind of a movie that exists. That said, as a small Clint Eastwood side project, the movie is certainly not bad at all. If you're not interested in the likes of "Aquaman," "Bumblebee" or "Mary Poppins Returns" this holiday season, this is a decent movie to hold you over until some of the bigger adult-targeted Oscar contenders come your way. I'll give "The Mule" a 7/10.