Warner Bros. has released The Mule trailer. Clint Eastwood returns to the screen for his latest directorial effort, which sees him playing Earl Stone, a man in his 80s who, broke and alone, decides to take a job as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel. Bradley Cooper costars as a DEA agent hot on Stone’s trail.

I honestly don’t know what to make of The Mule. There’s clearly a lot of sympathy for Stone and the choices he’s made, and on the one hand, that seems like a powerful story. You have a man near the end of his life trying to atone for the mistakes he’s made, and yet he continues to make more mistakes. And yet it seems like the only person who gets any humanity here is Stone, so the film has to answer why he, a drug courier that audiences would likely dismiss if he were young and a person of color, is deserving of our sympathy. Is it because of his age? Because he’s alone? I’ll admit this movie has far more of my curiosity than Eastwood’s previous effort from this year, The 15:17 to Paris, but I don’t know if he’ll stick the landing.

Check out The Mule trailer below. The film opens December 14th, and also stars Laurence Fishburne, Michael Peña, Dianne Wiest, and Andy Garcia.

Here’s the official synopsis for The Mule:

From Warner Bros. Pictures, Imperative Entertainment and BRON Creative comes Clint Eastwood’s newest feature film, the drama “The Mule.”  In addition to directing, the veteran actor will step in front of the lens again, alongside fellow stars Bradley Cooper, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Peña, Dianne Wiest and Andy Garcia, as well as Alison Eastwood, Taissa Farmiga, Ignacio Serricchio and Loren Dean, Eugene Cordero.

 

Eastwood stars as Earl Stone, a man in his 80s who is broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive.  Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he’s just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel.  He does well—so well, in fact, that his cargo increases exponentially, and Earl is assigned a handler.  But he isn’t the only one keeping tabs on Earl; the mysterious new drug mule has also hit the radar of hard-charging DEA agent Colin Bates.  And even as his money problems become a thing of the past, Earl’s past mistakes start to weigh heavily on him, and it’s uncertain if he’ll have time to right those wrongs before law enforcement, or the cartel’s enforcers, catch up to him.

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