Blood Work (2002)

Clint Eastwood, as director, has mastered the art of writing himself into his own films. In Pale Rider, for example, he knew just where to place himself in front of the camera and throughout his career he has delivered some great one-liners. Here in Blood Work, Eastwood delivers a performance that feels like all the characters he has played before but just a little older.

Eastwood plays Terry McCaleb, a retired F.B.I agent, who suffers from health problems after needing a heart transplant, following an incident we see right at the beginning of the film. Eastwood himself was 72 when he directed, produced and starred in Blood Work and having himself portray McCaleb immediately establishes a believability about the character.

McCaleb lives aboard a yacht and one day is visited by Graciella Jones whose sister has been murdered in a convenience store. In a seperate incident, a man has also been murdered whilst using an ATM and McCaleb is convinced the two are linked. These killings provide the platform for the screenplay to unfold in what will come to involve a Russian factory worker and ultimately a blood link. The police in the film view McCaleb as poking his nose in buisness that is no longer his concern but McCaleb has personal reasons of his own for wanting to get involved. Happy Valentines Day.

The screenplay is excellent and fluidly shifts between three ongoing plotlines. The investigation is obviously the main focus of the film and remains interesting and intriguing throughout the film but there is also the subplot of McCaleb's health with remains an issue until the very end as well as the developing (and perhaps unlikely) relationship that develops between Terry and Graciella.

There is good support from Jeff Daniels, Wanda De Jesus and Paul Rodriguez who all portray memorable characters but like most of Eastwood's films he steals the show on the performance front.

The story perhaps comes full circle twenty minutes too early. The mystery is solved but the film carries on as we see it at it's most Hollywood (although the film actually never comes anywhere close to falling into that Typical Hollywood Thriller mould) as the film climaxes with an action scene aboard a ship that didn't really have me caring about it half as much as I cared about the rest of the film. These scenes do however allow Eastwood's clever direction and the intelligent screenplay to shine once again as there is something of a lethargic nature to the sequence due the health of McCaleb.

Blood Work is though up there with Eastwood's best and of the nine films I've seen with him at the helm I'd say it is only better by two: Million Dollar Baby and Changeling. Eastwood is in his 80's now and is directing his best films in this period. His work in the noughties eclipses everything I've seen by him from the 70', 80's and 90's and with Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers up next I'm sure I will continue to vouch for that statement.

Rating: 8-8.5/10