SENIOR SMUGGLERS
Boundaries
The Mule
There were two juicy lead roles in 2018 played by actors pushing 90 who moved drugs. While Christopher Plummer gleefully delivers marijuana to old cronies as Jack in Shana Feste’s Boundaries, Clint Eastwood unwittingly becomes a cocaine smuggler as Earl in The Mule. Both aging men have issues with their daughters, played by Vera Farmiga in Boundaries and Eastwood’s real-life daugher Iris in The Mule. Each devoted too much time to their pleasures and not enough to family and pay for it in these octogenarian dramas. Highlights of Boundaries include Jack visiting buds Joey (Peter Fonda) and Stanley (Christopher Lloyd) and a funny police stop where Farmiga’s Laura nearly loses it.
In a similar cop stop in The Mule, Earl, playing the geezer outfoxes the fuzz. With its cartel and DEA subplots (Barry Cooper plays sensitive Agent Bates), The Mule, which Eastwood at 88 also directs, gets bogged down. It’s best when Earl is just driving along in his pickup truck singing to radio hits like “More Today Than Yesterday,” “On the Road Again” and “Dang Me.”
