Clint Eastwood's 2002 Thriller Was A Commercial Flop That Deserves Another Look

Clint Eastwood was 72 years old in 2002, and he looked it. He hadn't aged gracefully, he'd just aged like people tend to do. That already weathered facade just got craggier and craggier, and there was nothing Eastwood could or cared to do about it. What he could control was his physique, and you were well aware that if you messed with this septuagenarian, he'd leave you with the cleanest clock in town.

As such, Eastwood could've easily made another Dirty Harry movie, and, despite that ever-wrinkling face, carried it off. But Eastwood loathes inauthenticity. He knew that most cops of Harry Callahan's age have fled to Florida or Arizona to live off their pension. And he'd already played the too-old-for-this-s*** card in the awful "The Rookie" and the sublime "In the Line of Fire." If he wanted to make a law enforcement action flick at 72, it wasn't enough for the film to acknowledge his mortality. It had to be explicitly about his mortality.

Michael Connelly's crime novel "Blood Work" was a perfect piece of material through which Eastwood could ponder the looming specter of death. The story centers on Terry McCaleb (Eastwood), an FBI Agent who, after suffering a near-fatal heart attack while chasing a suspected serial killer, receives a new heart and retires to a quiet life on a fishing boat in Long Beach. His uneventful yet unhappy existence is disrupted when Graciella Rivers (Wanda De Jesus), the sister of the murdered woman whose heart saved McCaleb's life, asks him to track down her sibling's killer. He feels duty-bound to honor her request, but he gets more than he bargained for when the serial killer he never caught resurfaces to torture him anew.

There is action in "Blood Work," but Eastwood keeps us wincingly aware of the life-or-death stakes for McCaleb. When he tells his doctor (Anjelica Huston) what he's up to, she threatens to drop him as a patient. But McCaleb, who's additionally moved by the fact that Graciella's sister left behind a four-year-old boy, can't let it go, especially when his old nemesis, the Code Killer, keeps taunting him.

Since McCaleb is freelancing, he needs the assistance of a friendly LASD Detective (Tina Lifford) and his loopy alcoholic neighbor (Jeff Daniels) to pursue his investigation. "Blood Work" doesn't have a deep bench of characters, so the identity of the Code Killer is fairly obvious early on. But Eastwood doesn't much care about the whodunnit aspect of Connelly's book. This is a movie about not surrendering to the fear of death. Or something like that.

"Blood Work" seemed like a great opportunity for Eastwood to revisit Dirty Harry in much the same way "Unforgiven" allowed him to reconsider his iconic Western persona. McCaleb, however, is a relatively decent guy; he's more like Secret Service Agent Frank Horrigan from "In the Line of Fire" (who's also being targeted by a serial killer). We'd have to wait for "Gran Torino" for Eastwood to reckon with his bigoted San Francisco investigator. "Blood Work" is simply Eastwood considering the nearness of his inevitable demise, knowing it's coming but refusing to let it overwhelm him. Brian Helgeland's adapted script gets the job done (and Eastwood was pleased enough with his output here to re-team with him on the critically acclaimed "Mystic River"), but it's not as thematically deft as Clint's best work. It's both a transitional film and a significant entry in Eastwood's oeuvre. It's well worth watching.