Not one of Eastwood's best films

Clint Eastwood, now 88, has made some great movies over his long career but his 2018 film The Mule isn't one of them. Granted, Eastwood does a find job of acting playing the lead - an 87-year-old man whose run into financial straits and takes on a job as a drug "mule" for a Mexican cartel, carrying every-increasing shipments of narcotics in the bed of his pickup truck from El Paso (I think; the movie is very confusing about locations and about Eastwood's route) to Chicago. Apparently this movie is based on the exploits of a real man, who came to no good end; it's based on an NYT feature story. That doesn't help matters, though. The scenes of his several drug runs and of his various meetings w/ cartel members at several levels, including the head of the cartel, just feel like so many cartel movies and TV shows we've all seen in recent years (see for a good example Oazark), but without the tension (obviously, Eastwood will make it to the end of the movie. There are some humorous moments, however, because of Eastoowd's naivete and lack of facility with the basic tools of communication: he can't figure out how to send a text, he has a propensity for stopping for sandwiches, to help stranded motorists, and for hookups w/ prostitutes when he stays overnight on his routes; he also foolishly flashes around his cash payments and spends the $ extravagantly. On the other hand, he's shrewd in some ways, steering the police away from his truck on a few stops. So is he wise or a fool? The movie never decides that. The real lead weight on the film, though, is Eastwood's broken relationship w/ his ex wife and his daughter (and granddaughter); these scenes are so tendentious, poorly written, and logically inconsistent as to stop the momentum such as it is dead in its tracks every time the home life gets introduced; my guess is that the original story had none of this, that the family life was shoe-horned in to give the drama some human context, and it just doesn't work. In the end, this film is a minor work w/in a well-worn movie genre - worth seeing if at all for Eastwood's performance only.