Since winning the Best Director Oscar for Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's directorial output has been much better when he isn't cast as the lead (compare A Perfect World and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with True Crime and Absolute Power).  With Blood Work, the septuagenarian gives us his best work in front of the camera since making that award-winning western back in 1993.  And unlike most of Hollywood's senior citizens who built careers on action films, Eastwood plays his age here and at times genuinely looks like just might keel over.

In Work, Eastwood (Space Cowboys) plays Terry McCaleb, an FBI profiler we first meet as he arrives at the scene of multiple murders committed by a serial killer whom McCaleb has been tracking for some time.  The case is major news and the Los Angeles media is clamoring for McCaleb's attention as he leaves the crime scene, nearly causing the agent to miss seeing a man he thinks might be the killer.  A chase ensues, and just as McCaleb has the perp in his grasp, he collapses and clutches his chest.

Flash forward two years, where the retired McCaleb has just had a heart transplant and is advised by his gruff doctor (Anjelica Huston, The Royal Tenenbaums) to relax for several months on his boat.  McCaleb tries but is soon disturbed by Graciela Rivers (Wanda De Jesus, Ghosts of Mars), who wants to hire him to investigate the murder of her sister.  At first, McCaleb wants nothing to do with the case, but he relents when he learns Graciela's sister was his heart donor.

What follows is a pretty typical but somewhat interesting investigation, which is openly mocked by the Homicide detectives (Paul Rodriguez and Dylan Walsh) who think they already have the case sewn up.  Together with the help of Graciela, a friend on the force (Tina Lifford, Joe Somebody) and his neighbor at the harbor (Jeff Daniels), McCaleb worms his way into a myriad of situations in which he is neither fit nor legally allowed to be.  He has no badge and no PI license, but his mannerisms are all he needs to make everyone else think he's supposed to be on the job.

I think the intent of Work was to focus more on the development of the characters (McCaleb, specifically) than the whodunit itself.  At least I hope that was the case, because the last reel was almost predictable enough to induce widespread eye-rolling.  There aren't any red herrings to distract you from cracking this case much more quickly than McCaleb does. It's pathetically easy to finger the Who, and the Why isn't much more difficult to figure out.  But hey, we're sitting in reclining seats in an air-conditioned theatre, while McCaleb is running around in the Southern California heat just 60 days after getting a new heart.

Work's screenplay was written by A Knight's Tale director Brian Helgeland, who adapted the story from former LA Times crime reporter Michael Connelly's 1998 novel of the same name.  Like Eastwood, Helgeland's recent resume runs the gamut from superfuckingcool (L.A. Confidential) to jesuswhatabagofshit (The Postman).  Both writer and director have a history of making films that are way too long, and Work doesn't disappoint when it comes to the inclusion of a bunch of just plain unnecessary stuff.  The film's pace is slow and methodical, just like McCaleb's investigation style, but that's not such a bad thing.  In fact, if you replaced Eastwood with Peter Fonda or Robert Forster, I think Work could have been an arthouse hit.

1:50 -

for violence and language