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This past week I had the good fortune to share a theater with a
busload of resigned and raspy-breathed septuagenarians fresh from
the bingo parlor buffet. Somehow we had each boated across the generation
gap and congregated in the same place for the same purpose: to see
the new Clint Eastwood thriller, Blood Work.
Eastwood’s latest acting/directing outing sees him in a role
not even Nostradamus could possibly have predicted, namely as a retired
FBI officer who gets pulled back into a case by a killer with a sociopathic
obsession and a need for closure. After suffering professional and
physical defeat at the hands of a killer, Agent Terry McCaleb (Eastwood)
retires to a houseboat with a new lease on life and a new heart thanks
to a heart transplant.
 Predictably,
this heart has a tragic past, having been taken from a woman murdered
in an unsolved armed robbery. McCaleb gets dragged into this past
by the woman’s sister, Graciella Rivers (Wanda de Jesus). Rivers
guilt-trips McCaleb into investigating the case himself, despite
the obligatory objections of his physician (Anjelica Huston). Also
dragged into the investigation is McCaleb’s wharf-rat neighbor,
played by the suspiciously cast Jeff Daniels, whose performance seems
a hybrid of Jeff Bridges’ “Dude” Lebowski and Daniel’s
own Harry Dunne of Dumb & Dumber fame. McCaleb’s
foils in his investigation are the two homicide detectives assigned
to the case, played by comedian Paul Rodriguez and Congo’s Dylan
Walsh (yes…THAT Congo). With the primary characters (and
primary suspects) on the bus, Blood Work begins its geriatrically-paced
guided tour into suspenseless mediocrity.
The greatest surprises involved in Blood Work are not introduced
by the plot, but by the concept that this film was brought to life
by the same men responsible for such films as Unforgiven and L.A.
Confidential. Director Clint Eastwood here forgoes the fascinating
nuances of torn characters he demonstrated in Unforgiven, A
Perfect World, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Instead he delivers oblivious characters, unconvincing stunts, and
a love scene between McCaleb and Rivers that surpasses awkward and
heads straight for unsettling. In addition, screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s
script hobbles along its formula, liver-spotted with over expository
dialogue and thriller clichés older than the combined age
of the cast. The film focuses too sharply on Eastwood and de Jesus,
leaving the secondary characters played by Daniels and Rodriguez
to literally wander aimlessly through the background.
Many moments in the film fight a lose-lose battle between awkwardness
and pointlessness, such as the love scene and a painfully overlong
scene of McCaleb and the homicide detectives overaudibly masticating
doughnuts. The plot limps forward on a walker, allowing the audience
ample time to head to the concessions stand for Jujubes and popcorn
and still stay ahead of McCaleb. By the time the climactic moment
arrives when McCaleb finally pinpoints the killer, the screen is
littered and marred by the Jujubes and spitballs of the audience
members who arrived at this same conclusion half-an-hour to an hour
before him.
Even though the septuagenarians I shared the theater with appeared
to enjoy the film (or just had their oxygen tanks turned up too high)
I couldn’t help but see it as a tumble down the stairs from
Eastwood’s other films, such as Unforgiven and the enjoyable
and underrated Space Cowboys. Seeing mostly a broken hip in
an otherwise exemplary directorial career, I can honestly say I struggled
through Blood Work in much the same manner folks of Clint’s
age struggle through their (remaining) lives: wondering why I bothered
and praying to Dear Sweet Jesus for it to end.
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