It’s 1980 and ex-cowboy Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood) is asked by ranch owner Howard Polk (Dwight Yoakam) to head into Mexico and kidnap his son from his mother and return him to Texas. Mike accepts and spends the next few weeks on a road trip with the teenage Rafo (Edwardo Minett) and his rooster Macho. 

Clint Eastwood is a once great film maker who seems to be on a very poor run of form. Not since 2014’s American Sniper has he made a film worthy of his ability and Cry Macho is a nadir in a poor crop of recent films. In fact I would go as far to say it is pointless, dull and amateurish. 

The plot is largely incident free and aimless. Mike finds the young boy quickly and with relative ease. What then follows is them spending some time in a small town bonding over learning the ways of a cowboy and Mike falling in love with a woman who can not even speak the same language as him. Any threat from those who might want to stop Mike evaporates in poorly staged scenes of confrontation with about as much threat as a puppy. 

The set up is clumsy. Opening with Mike getting the sack one year earlier in an exposition dump that tells us why he has had a troubled life. Bare in mind the man sacking him for being such a liability is also the man hiring him one year later and you start to understand just how clumsy. 

Then there is the question of age. The choice for Eastwood to play someone who I think is supposed to be forty years younger than himself seems incredibly odd and his creaking movement is explained away by the earlier mentioned exposition dump telling us he had broken his back in a rodeo accident. But frankly it is ridiculous. When you have a 91 year old man whose love interest is 39 years younger than him it is uncomfortable. When that 91 year old man visibly struggles to get in a car it is somewhat unbelievable he can tame a wild horse. Add to that the fact that Rafo’s mother seems to find him attractive as well and you start to wonder about whether Clint is seeing his casting choices as a way to make himself feel better? 

The final nail in the coffin though is the script, which frankly is dross and is summed up by the fact that Eastwood’s character literally tells Rafo the moral of the story five minutes before the film ends. 

Awful.