Blood Work, which directly preceded Eastwood's 2004 star/director turn in Million Dollar Baby, tells the tale of Terrell McCaleb, an aging FBI superstar investigator followed by a fan who murders people solely for the enjoyment he gets from having McCaleb investigate his crimes. McCaleb suffers a heart attack while chasing the murderer, and his career ends. Two years later McCaleb is recovering from a heart transplant and is confronted by a young woman who wants McCaleb to investigate the murder of her sister whose heart McCaleb received for his transplant.
Enter gravel-voiced Eastwood and witness as he stiffens up every scene he’s in. I realize his style worked for the Rawhide TV show that launched his career, but some time after 1973 it stopped convincing me.
I’m sorry, but — as with Roger Moore’s 1980s James Bond before him (Moore was 58 when he last played Bond) — the septuagenarian Eastwood does not make a convincing action hero. Kudos to him in this go-round, as he played convincingly someone who would most likely have a heart attack after chasing down a suspect (and further kudos to Eastwood who clearly did some pretty hard charging on camera for this scene in the film), but all his tough-guy lines and tough-guy machismo fall short on the feeble, gravel-voiced delivery. I have even less desire to see 72-year-old (at the time) Eastwood in a love scene with a 30-something woman!
I don’t know if it was for comic relief (from the non-existent suspense?) or for a real sense of the fear of repercussion, but the choice of actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez as a hot-headed, McCaleb-hating, LAPD homicide detective was the wrong one. I don’t know when Rodriguez stopped being funny, but I suspect it was sometime just before he began filming for this role, in which he was neither funny nor menacing.
As suspense films go (I can’t speak for the novel, as I haven’t read it...though its treatment here doesn’t promise better), it couldn’t be more obvious if they placed a neon sign in every scene pointing to the head of the serial killer who lures McCaleb out from retirement. I guessed it about ⅓ of the way through the film.
I watched Eastwood’s first Oscar-winning directorial effort, Unforgiven (1992), twice — once when it first came out and again about 20 years later — and, each time, I failed to see its supposed greatness. As a film with a purported meta-message about the awfulness of violence in film, it was an awfully violent film. I don’t understand how it won an Academy Award other than for the suspicion that the Academy got together and said, “Gee, this guy has made a lot of movies and never won a thing! This one looks pretty and kinda makes sense. Let’s give it to him!”
Million Dollar Baby is — in my humble opinion — Eastwood’s magnum opus. It grabs you, gives you someone to root for, and then rips your heart out with a twist so unexpected you’ll spend a week in a cervical collar...and then it’s followed by yet another, equally unexpected twist.
Perhaps as his preparation for Million Dollar Baby Eastwood studied the completed Blood Work as everything not to do in a film.
Blood Work. A Numb Butt-Cheeks® rating* of 5.0. Miss it if you can. You’ll probably get a better rush from reading the book one page a day.
*The Numb Butt-Cheeks® scale of zero to ten: a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of zero indicates such a disregard for the film that one could get up to go to the bathroom at any point without worry of missing anything exciting or important (or a desire to return!); a Numb Butt-Cheeks rating of ten indicates there is no way one would get up and leave, save for a distinct tearing of bladder tissue.
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2 comments:
I will take your word for it. I have not cared for him for many a year.
kenju-- I must have put this one in my Netflix queue along with The Outlaw Josey Wales, but it was so long ago I had forgotten it was an Eastwood flick. I have taken to the practice now not to read the descriptions of the films on the sleeves. If it's a movie I've never seen, I enjoy the surprise (or disappointment) of discovering the story.
He directs, stars in and often provides jazz tunes for his films. His endeavors seem very self-indulgent and narcissistic to me. Maybe he's saving a few bucks on his films, but, JEEZ! Give some actors some work, why don'tcha!
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