Blood Work
Director: Clint Eastwood
Year: 2002
Rating: 7.0
I feel like I
am getting repetitive in reviewing these later Clint Eastwood suspense crime
films. They aren't very innovative, the scripts feel familiar and predictable,
Clint is getting older in each of the three that I just watched - In the
Line of Fire, Absolute Power and this one but I found them all entertaining
and well made. If it was anyone but Eastwood in the films, they would be
forgettable. Maybe they are in the scheme of his entire career and are far
from considered his best work, but Eastwood is at this point the last of
the actors who can take up good space on the screen by simply standing there.
There haven't been many. Wayne and Cooper come to mind. Certainly no one
in American film today and it is hard to imagine the film industry producing
another. None of these three are particularly good actors - they all fall
back on their persona - but it was a persona that was appealing and very
American. At least American as we like to think of ourselves. The first two
came out of the studio system that could mold actors and then stick with
it in film after film. There was no studio system for Eastwood - he created
his persona out of nothing but a vision of himself. Starting with the Spaghetti
Westerns he felt raw, hewn out of wood, solitary, grim and relentless. He
took that into the Dirty Harry films and beyond. By his 60s though he was
softer - in In the Line of Fire he had a sense of humor, in Absolute Power
he had a daughter and here he has a heart and a need to serve justice for
that heart. Not that I will do it, but I have the urge to watch all of his
films - except the damn Orangutan films! Not now. Not ever. His biggest box
office hits.
This is based on a novel by Michael Connelly
who wrote all the terrific Bosch books. McCaleb (Eastwood) is a legendary
FBI profiler and agent who is after a serial killer. The serial killer has
taken on McCaleb as if in a game, leaving codes for him, creating a dependency
on the FBI agent. After a massacre in a house, McCaleb thinks he spots his
sneakers and gives chase down alleys and over fences - and then McCaleb has
a heart attack and gets off a few shots as he goes down. Two years later
he is retired living on a boat and with a new heart. Graciella (Wanda de
Jesus) comes to him and asks him to investigate her sister's murder. She
was pointlessly killed in a convenience store with a bullet to the head.
Why me, he asks? Because you have her heart.
And he investigates - ties it to another
similar murder - comes up empty time after time. Random crimes with no clues.
It becomes a police procedural in a sense, but the audience can follow his
logic from step to step. He stops and explains it in case we are a little
slow. He hires his slacker next-door boat neighbor (Jeff Daniels) to help
out. Dead bodies start showing up. But there seems to be no one that can
help. His doctor (Anjelica Huston) thinks this will kill him. But he feels
guided by the heart inside him to finish it. Directed by Eastwood, he gives
his character a sense of mortality that hangs on him like a suit that needs
to be thrown out. Eastwood plays his age here - ok there is the romance that
seems out of place as it did in In the Line of Fire - damn you have a new
heart - I am sure sex is off the menu - but he is always conscious that his
life is one run away, one fight away, one heart attack away.
