I wonder if Clint Eastwood is one of the few directors who could have gotten this movie made. It took me a while to get around to watching it, partly due to some of the negative buzz I heard out there in the Interworld.

I suspect I liked this movie for the same reason a lot of the bad buzzy folks hated it. How many respected directors have the star power to get a movie made that, even with a violent Mexican drug cartel involved in the plot, turns out to be a thoughtful, mostly gentle character study of an old man awakening fully to regrets of how he treated his family in his younger years. This type of story even goes against the grain of the violent movies that made Eastwood a star in the first place.

It is not a movie I will likely watch again - there is just too much out there still to see for this movie to draw me in a second time. But it was entertaining, a fine addition to the library of diverse films directed by the Man with No Name.