‘If you can’t protect the integrity of the system, then there is no system...’
2002 and Blood Work marked the end of one era of Clint Eastwood’s directorial career and the start of another one. After beginning the ’90s with Unforgiven, A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County, all of which were a success to some degree, by 2002, Eastwood was coming off the back of Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and True Crime. Not terrible films but certainly not in the upper echelon of the Clint Eastwood oeuvre. There was a pervasive feeling that the old dog was repeating the same old tricks as he entered his seventh decade. Blood Work was the final film in this cycle and it lost money, something rare for an Eastwood project. It is perhaps this relative failure that lit a fire under the Hollywood legend because he followed it up with Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and Gran Torino, perhaps the best run of his directorial career…
Terry McCaleb (Eastwood) is a retired FBI profiler recovering from a heart transplant who is drawn back into service when a serial killer starts killing people with a very particular blood type. It’s something like that anyway. The plot is faintly ridiculous throughout. The supporting cast includes Jeff Daniels as McCaleb’s right-hand man, Anjelica Huston as his permanently furious doctor and Wanda De Jesus as his love interest.
Aside from the convoluted plot and lack of chemistry between Eastwood and De Jesus, Blood Work just feels… tired. By this point in 2002, audiences had already seen Eastwood play this character a hundred times in a hundred movies. The flirtatious ageing cop not afraid to break the rules was just as much of an established Eastwood archetype at the dawn of the millennium as the stranger riding into a mysterious town was in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ve seen this version of Clint Eastwood many times, and we’ve seen it done better. It doesn’t help that the film is tonally all over the place, one minute revelling in gruesome violence and the next giving far too much screen time to Paul Rodriguez’s wise-cracking antagonist Detective Arrango. The film needs to pick a lane.
At the grand old age of 72, it was perhaps safe to assume that Blood Work marked the continuation of an actor and director winding down. It’s astonishing that from the ashes of this film, Eastwood went on to create some of his very best work, and for that reason, Blood Work works as a time capsule that signposts where the old master was heading next. It’s also not without its share of thrills and spills, with Eastwood maintaining that trademark twinkle in his eye that made his protagonists so compelling, even when the film going on around them was not – a solid if unspectacular entry in the Eastwood oeuvre.
