Formula: (American Made / Gran Torino) ^ The Room
OK, here we go.
The Mule is,
unless I'm forgetting about something major, the worst movie I've seen in 2018.
Immediately after I got out of the movie, I joked to a friend that I'd believe
it if you told me that Tommy Wiseau (mastermind behind The Room) was a
creative consultant for the movie, and I don't reference The Room
lightly as a comparison. Doing so means that I'm downgrading the film from bad
to incompetent.
In case you aren't familiar with the movie, The
Mule is based on the true story of a 90 year old man who smuggled large
quantities of drugs cross country. Clint plays Earl, who has always put work
before family. He's ruined all his relationships as a result. He's fallen on
hard times in his later years and stumbles onto the lucrative opportunity to
transport drugs in his truck for a drug cartel from Texas to Illinois.
Meanwhile, Bradley Cooper and Michael Pena are DEA agents investigating the
smuggling ring that Earl is at the center of.
Most of my issues with the movie come down to one
thing: Clint Eastwood is unbelievably miscast. So much of the movie relies of
Earl being a charming, slick guy. I imagine Jack Lemmon or Paul Newman in their
later years would've been excellent. Maybe Christopher Plummer now. Definitely
Robert Redford in a couple years. Earl should be a man who, when he smiles, you
can still see the young man that women swooned for. He needs to be a charmer
who can't turn it off it he tried. None of these things have ever been who
Clint Eastwood is. In The Mule, every time there's a scene where Earl is
supposed to be the life of the party, Eastwood looks lost and out of place.
There's a flashback scene early on when Earl is supposed to be at the height of
his charisma. I literally expected it to be a dream sequence, because everyone
looked so uncomfortable and out of place; like they were humoring Clint. I
really can't stress enough how bad Clint was for the role. His only credentials
were that he's old enough.
All of this isn't Clint "the actor's"
fault. Clint "the director" deserves some blame too (with no help
from the screenplay either). And this is where I evoke The Room. The
Room isn't only bad because Tommy Wiseau is a horrible leading man. What
takes it from bad to all-time bad is that everyone else in the movie is selling
some fantasy of the leading man. In The Room, Wiseau is the handsomest,
most misunderstood, All American good guy. The movie plays like some fantasy
world that Johnny (Wiseau's character) concocted. That happens in The Mule
too. Earl is the guy that every woman at the wedding wants to dance with.
Despite only being married for ten years decades ago, he's still the love of
his ex-wife's life. He does one decent thing by the end of the movie, and the
daughter who literally refused to be in the same room as him for 12 years is
then treating him like the best man who ever lived. The movie treats Earl like
he's the smartest guy in every room. I really enjoyed how the cartel talks
about him like he's some sort of virtuoso driver when his only
"skill" is that he's old and white enough to not be suspicious.
One odd quirk to the movie was all the benign racism
and political incorrectness. Much of it added absolutely nothing except to say
"You see, Earl is really old". Like, Earl helps a black family change
a flat tire and he calls them "negros". They respond by politely
saying "we don't use that word anymore". He doesn't apologize. He
just pauses for a second like it's the first time he ever heard that and has a
"gee whiz, the world sure is weird now" look on his face. In general,
Earl uses different slurs or slang in the same way that irresponsible parents teach
a three year old to swear as a lark. There's also a weirdly tone deaf scene
with Cooper and Pena in which they pull over a truck that matches the
description of a tip they received. The driver is Hispanic and spends the
entire time repeating how scared he is and how he knows that the odds are
higher than they've ever been that he could be killed right now. Mind you, this
guy is completely innocent and appears to be an ideal citizen. No drugs. No
weapons. No attitude. He doesn't even speak Spanish*. This is all played as a
joke. Except, this guy is so clearly shaken by it, that I left the scene
outright feeling awful for the guy. He wasn't an exaggerated cartoon. He's a
guy who is going to call his wife crying afterwards. That disturbed me in a way
I don't think was intended.
*Not that there's anything wrong with speaking
Spanish. By this, I mean, there's no hint of immigration on him except for his
skin Even "build the wall" people would be like "he's
cool".
I think what's most frustrating about The Mule
is that I saw what they were trying to do; they just did it badly. For example,
my favorite scene on paper is later in the movie. Earl is leaving lunch with
his handlers for the cartel who are Hispanic. His handlers spent lunch
complaining about how he does things and trying to micromanage him. As Earl and
the handlers are going to their separate cars, a police officer stops the
handlers (because, racism). Earl diffuses the situation with white privilege,
then in a bravado move, opens his truck, filled with kilos of drugs, to show something else to the officer. The
cop doesn't suspect anything or notice any of the other bags. It's a total
power play by Earl, showing off his invisibility to authorities and how that
makes him invaluable to the cartel. In the film though, Clint stumbles over
that. Nothing in the filmmaking builds the tension. The direction completely
fails to capture what is actually a really smart scene on the page. This
happens a lot. Intention does equal execution.
I could go on for a long time picking at other
problems I had with the movie. The dialogue is clunky throughout. The movie is
never as tense as it should be. The investigation by the DEA is ridiculously
bad (They know the mule is at a specific hotel and that he's driving a black
truck, but they don't suspect Earl because he's old or somehow didn't notice he
was driving a black truck? Really?). The way the cartel is run is laughable. I
haven't hated a movie as thoroughly as this in a very long time. I haven't
always liked Clint Eastwood's movies, but this is the first time I've thought
he's too old to be doing it anymore. It feels like everyone in the movie is
participating in it to be nice and no one had the heart to tell him that it's
not working. I guess you'd say that The Mule is "professionally
bad". It looks like a real movie. Talented people are doing what they can
to make it make it work. It has all the available resources to be good, and a
lot of poor decisions cause it to be bad. I have a very hard time seeing how
this doesn't land on Clint as the problem.
One Last Thought: My policy for theater viewing is to swim with the tide.
If I'm watching a comedy and I think it's funny, I'll laugh out loud. If I
don't think it's funny when it's supposed to be, I just won't laugh. For the
most part, I'll internalize my reaction because I don't want to ruin the
experience for someone having a different response to a movie. Just because I
like or hate it doesn't mean someone else has to feel the same way. I don't boo
or jeer. I try to be respectful to everyone else who paid to see it. But, good
god, I wanted to laugh so badly throughout The Mule. I thought scenes
and dialogue that were supposed to be serious were laughably bad. It took so
much effort not to snort at different point. I really wanted to laugh but I was
raised to be more polite than that. What I'm trying to say is, I want a gold
star or something.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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