"Blood Work"

Clint Eastwood gets a new heart, but never cracks a smile, in his latest competent, hard-boiled detective yarn.

By Charles Taylor

Aug 9, 2002 | Has Clint Eastwood gotten better or have mainstream movies gotten so bad that it just seems as if he's gotten better? Eastwood has always been a pedestrian, literal-minded director, with no particular imagination or visual flair. The actors who've worked with Eastwood have been talking for so long about what a pleasure it is to make movies with him, and about how assured and relaxed he is, that it's got to be sincere instead of hype or professional courtesy.

The trouble is that that sense of offhand relaxation -- the thing that makes, say, Howard Hawks' movies one of Hollywood's lasting joys -- never seems to make it into Eastwood's dogged, deliberate movies. (Though some of the interplay between Eastwood, James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland in Eastwood's last picture, "Space Cowboys," came close.)

But Eastwood is competent, and if that sounds like damning him with faint praise, let me hasten to point out that competence, even the most basic competence of providing a plot that makes sense, is not something we can routinely expect from Hollywood anymore. Eastwood's new film of Michael Connelly's mystery novel "Blood Work" is a typically meat-and-potatoes piece of direction. And that has something to do with why it's pleasing to sit through, how it manages to be involving without being in your face.

It's not an important picture, and probably not even a memorable one, but I had a good time. It's a relief to see a mainstream entertainment that doesn't feel as if it's aimed at a 14-year-old's sensibility. And not just because there are no explosions or car chases and the gunplay is kept to a minimum. There's something like discretion in Eastwood's direction and in Brian Helgeland's screenplay. This is a serial-killer thriller that doesn't feel as if it was made by a closet necrophiliac. Eastwood doesn't linger on the bodies at the crime scenes, and Helgeland has wisely eliminated an awful story from Connelly's novel about the unsolved case that haunts the lead character. (It's such a grisly tale that it makes you want to glue those pages of the book together.)

There are other liberties taken with the novel: The mystery has been streamlined and characters and subplots eliminated. But as a Connelly fan, I didn't sense any disrespect for the source. Eastwood has made a detective movie that's really about detection. Which means we watch him tracking down leads, putting the pieces of the case together, talking to people. It's a good joke that the most reckless piece of physical daring in the entire movie comes when a man who's had a heart transplant bites into a Krispy Kreme doughnut (those things'll kill ya -- and I could eat four right now).

That man is Terry McCaleb (Eastwood), an FBI profiler who had to retire from the job after suffering a massive heart attack while chasing a perp known as the Code Killer. Two years later, Terry and his newly installed ticker are leading a quiet life on his houseboat. A young woman named Graciela Rivers (Wanda De Jesús) approaches him and asks him to investigate the murder of her sister during a convenience-store robbery. Terry refuses, explaining that he's off the job. Until Graciela tells him that it's her sister's heart he's carrying around in his chest. Over the objections of his doctor (Anjelica Huston, who projects a nice, snappish air of authority), and the cops (Paul Rodriguez, allowed to act too grating and off-putting, and Dylan Walsh) who don't want him interfering in their case, Terry begins to investigate the murder, and to suspect it's the work of a serial killer.

In Connelly's novel, Terry's sense of responsibility to the dead woman is of a piece with the hard-boiled atmosphere. On the screen the sentimentality of that conceit is more pronounced. It needs a "Magnificent Obsession" air to it; it needs to embrace the sort of outsize melodrama that movies, because of their bigness, can do better than any other medium (except maybe opera) and, at their best, make transcendently emotional. That's exactly the sort of thing Eastwood, whose directing style is as taciturn as his squint, can't provide. (It was a problem in Eastwood's "tasteful and restrained" film of "The Bridges of Madison County," too; who the hell wants a restrained tear-jerker?) Terry's sense of indebtedness never achieves the emotional heft it should; it's just a task to be grimly gotten through.

Next Page: Clint's great virtue: He's a hero who doesn't care whether we like him or not

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