Eastwood plays a horticulturist named Earl Stone, who, in 2005, is doing great as a businessman specializing in daily flowers (whatever those are). He is at the local Midwest Flowerers Convention, where he ironically wins an award for being unconcerned about the Internet and the convenience, ease, and cost of purchasing flowers online. We learn that Earl is at the floral convention instead of his daughter Iris’s second marriage (Alison Eastwood – Poolhall Junkies, Absolute Power). But life is good for Earl. He prefers buying a crowd full of strangers a round of drinks instead of being there to give away his only child. He is reminded of what he is missing when the bartender asks him if he wants to buy drinks for a wedding party that he hasn’t noticed. It proves to be a theme. Earl is far more interested in driving around the country to various exhibitions, conventions, and competitions than he is with his family. He also has a thriving farm back home that takes much of his time and attention.

Fast-forward to 2013, and Earl’s home has foreclosed. The Internet has swept in and bankrupted his business. His possessions are in his beat-up Jeep, and he has nowhere to go. Promises of paying for an open bar at his granddaughter Ginny’s (What They Had, The Nun) upcoming wedding have been abandoned. The relationship with Iris is estranged and topped by the tense relationship with his ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest – Parenthood, Hannah and Her Sisters). After Iris and Mary force Earl away from Ginny’s engagement party, he is approached by a friend of Ginny’s who approaches Earl about driving a product from Texas back up to the Detroit area, seeing the older man as a perfect drug mule after learning that he has a pristine driving record.

Broke and in debt, he takes the man up on his offer and drives to Texas to get his first shipment, not knowing what it is. And even if he doesn’t know that it is drugs, he must have some inclination that what he is transporting is illegal. Why else would he be paid very handsomely to drive very carefully, told he can never look at the cargo, to drop off his car at said location, and come back to it where a considerable wad of cash will be waiting for him. He doesn’t seem too intimidated by the men he routinely meets within Texas, and over time, he gets to know them much more than any drug mule should get to know his employer. He does half a dozen runs, though this movie doesn’t specify the timeframe between runs. With each successful trip, he gets recognized more and more by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán (Andy Garcia – When a Man Loves a Woman, Night Falls on Manhattan), the head of the Sinaloa Cartel. They feel he could be the organization’s top mule. So he puts two men on Earl to follow his every move.

It also becomes known to the D.E.A. that huge shipments are being brought into the Detroit area regularly, and agent Jeff Moore (Bradley Cooper – American Hustle, A Star is Born) and his partner Trevino (Michael Pena – Crash, End of Watch) are put on assignment to find this high-end mule. From this point, it becomes a relatively straightforward cat-and-mouse movie. Only it’s not that because cat and mouse movies are usually exciting and suspenseful, and The Mule wasn’t either of those. Honestly, this movie was a series of one-act plays with the lead characters appearing in different settings. There was the infamous trailer scene where Earl gets pulled over by a state trooper. There are many scenes of Earl disobeying the cartel’s orders by engaging with escorts at night, veering off course to have lunch at his favorite barbecue spot in the Midwest, or helping some motorists fix a flat tire. The Mule failed to follow a cohesive plan. The relationship that Earl tried to repair with his family was something that we never really cared about. In fact, I’m uncertain if there was a single character we cared about, and while Eastwood’s Earl was definitely the protagonist, he wasn’t particularly cheered for. I didn’t care much about what happened to him. I didn’t care if he got caught or got away with it all.

A scene in a Waffle House near the movie’s end puts Eastwood and Cooper onscreen for the first time. I wonder if Eastwood felt this was necessary or if he could replicate the first of two scenes between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the classic Heat or something else. But it felt out of place and fell flat on its face. Like why would Earl purposefully put himself in the same room with the man who is being paid to capture him and put him behind bars? It made no sense. But neither did many things in The Mule, a movie that took too many liberties with a true story that might have better been served as a documentary.

At 88 years of age, Eastwood is not past his prime as a director or an actor. He should continue to direct and star, though I don’t know if he should be the leading character in a movie he directs anymore. However, when he’s pitted against Cooper, he is outmatched. And I’m not saying that because Cooper is at the top of his game right now. It would have been difficult for Eastwood to have a great scene with Cooper in his prime. So, they are in two different leagues as actors. They are also in two different leagues as directors. As fabulous as Cooper’s directorial debut in A Star is Born was, he doesn’t have four Best Directing Academy Award nominations. Hopefully, he will someday, but as of 2018, Eastwood is the best combination of actor/director that we’ve ever seen, though others (like Robert Redford) are close.