In short, “Cry Macho” proves to be sharply ironic, starting with its very title (just wait). It takes its place in Eastwood’s larger cinematic tour of penitence—which includes, among its recent highlights, “Gran Torino”—yet actually winds all the way back to the very start of his directorial career, in 1971, with “Play Misty for Me.”

Eastwood’s films define demagogy precisely as the exploitation of one’s own work—of work worth doing for its own sake rather than for rewards or social advantages—and they hold a special place of contempt for the enticements and benefits of fame. The idea stands out most prominently in movies that reflect Eastwood’s own chosen career in entertainment and media—including “Play Misty for Me,” in which he plays a jazz d.j. who uses his local celebrity as a tool of seduction—but it also tears through such films as “White Hunter Black Heart,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” and “Richard Jewell,” all of which feature characters who pay the price for leveraging their accomplishments for public glory. In “Cry Macho,” Eastwood subjects Mike’s entire life—indeed, the very notion of what passes for a good life in the public eye—to a scathing revisionism. Mike looks back at his career in the public eye as vain and frivolous, enjoyed at the price of needless risk and pointless injury; it has left him empty and stunted, wounded and debilitated, unable to cope with inevitable emotional pain and loss.

The bird business risks seeming trivial or silly, of being perceived as a far-fetched comedic sidebar—no less than a story of a broken elder and a wounded youth helping to heal each other verges on cliché. Yet Eastwood relies on this combination of absurdity and melodrama to evoke hidden torments along with apparent glories, to suggest the grim struggles from which wisdom emerges—and how the existential anguish of those struggles leaves the wise in little shape to do much with their costly knowledge.

Eastwood dramatizes the underlying grimness of the picaresque adventure with a series of sublimely absurd coups de théâtre involving Macho, who repeatedly serves as a comedic deus ex machina to do what Mike—because of the physical and emotional burdens of his own burned-out machismo—can’t. Rafo’s headstrong independence roils with the same toughness that, as he intuits, energized Mike in his younger days, and he tries to insult Mike by suggesting that he has lost his machismo. In response, Mike distills the movie’s flattened rowdiness and searing regret into a single monologue, one that, in turn, echoes Eastwood’s crucial, career-long theme: the horror of demagogy.

He[Mike]’s simply the strong, silent type, his toughness tempered by good manners, family values and a fondness for animals. “This macho thing – it’s overrated,” he tells the boy. There’s something touching about seeing the 91-year-old Eastwood in such a reflective mood.

... this new outing doesn’t deliver the raw, profound themes of an Unforgiven. Nor is it a keen deconstruction of the masculine tropes that the actor/director once embodied and occasionally still clings to.
Dusting off a script that has lingered in development limbo for decades, the prolific, 91-year-old filmmaker has fashioned something that feels of a piece with Gran Torino (and shares screenwriter Nick Schenk).

Sadly, the returning writer/director combo also repeats the uncomfortable all-women-love-our-leathery-lead wish-fulfilment of The Mule.

It’s just a problem when your single-most compelling character is a rooster.

It’s a jarring, clunky introduction to a film that’s overstuffed with exposition, as if Eastwood needs to exhale Mike’s backstory in one deep breath before he can really get going.

Unfortunately, it’s then that the filmmaking becomes sloppy, reluctantly returning to a central plot which is half-baked at best.

So begins another smuggling adventure in the grand tradition of “The Mule,” with Eastwood reprising his favorite late career archetype of the surly grandpa who breaks the law by exploiting the white privilege he previously hasn’t thought about for even a minute of his life.

It’s only once Mike convinces Rafo (and Macho) to get in his car — a process which, like everything else in this breezy tumbleweed of a movie, requires very little fanfare — that the plot shrivels up and things begin to shift into a lower gear.

Eastwood has been an international symbol of masculine cool for longer than most of us have been alive, and “Cry Macho” is hardly the first time that he’s subverted his iconic screen image in order to question the bravado of its coding. But the fact of the matter is that all of that stuff just hits different when a dude nine years short of 100 grins at some know-nothing punk and says, “If a guy wants to name his cock Macho, that’s okay by me.”