A few weeks ago, there was a Clint Eastwood retrospective in Rio, and I ended up thinking not about the many highlights of his filmography, but what I think is the worst movie he signed as a director: 1990’s The Rookie. Why talk about a bad movie that barely anyone has thought about beyond late-night cable fodder for some 30 years? I’m not sure, but I think Clint Eastwood is a major artist, and so his missteps can be intriguing. People who like to caricature auteurism often act like it is about excusing lesser work, but it is mostly a way to think about movies and get something more out of them, so The Rookie is a bad movie, sometimes a very bad one, but it is also a Clint Eastwood movie and its connections to the movies around it make it more worthwhile to ponder about, if not necessarily to watch, than some other workman-like action movies from around 1990.
I’ve actually thought about The Rookie far too much throughout the years even though I don’t think I’ve seen it from start to finish in a couple decades prior to last week (although I’ve seen parts of it on TV from time to time). The main thing that I keep returning to is why he actually directed it. I know why it exists. Eastwood also directed and starred in White Hunter, Black Heart earlier that year, a roman à clef about the pre-production of The African Queen and John Huston’s obsession with hunting an elephant that is one of his most alienating and best movies, so The Rookie was clearly a trade-off. The same thing happened a couple of years before, when, in exchange for Warner financing his terrific Charlie Parker biopic Bird, he starred in a fifth Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool.
That movie was signed by his longtime stuntman Buddy Van Horn, and there has been a very consistent pattern since the 1970s of Eastwood farming his less ambitious efforts to his buddies like Van Horn or up and comers inside his production company Malpaso like screenwriter James Fargo. Eastwood’s name, for instance, is only in the most ambitious of the Dirty Harry sequels (Sudden Impact) and usually not on his occasional stabs at Burt Reynolds style of brash action comedy (save from 1977’s The Gauntlet). Yet, The Rookie is a film by Clint Eastwood; even though he barely bothers to find much of a connection to the material, he was actually far more engaged with the previous year’s Van Horn-directed Pink Cadillac. He bothered so little with The Rookie that he halted the shooting for almost a week so he could present White Hunter, Black Heart, at Cannes (it cost Warner a small fortune to indulge him, maybe he was being passively aggressive). Eastwood could be a master of the double take, delivering enough thrilling action while suggesting alienation and the cost behind it, but there’s barely a nod towards that on Rookie. The movie could pass easily for any of the many buddy cop movies that come off around the time.
It would be easy to compare The Rookie with a couple of sequels that come around the same time like Lethal Weapon 2 or Another 48 Hrs. The movie is more expensive than the average Eastwood Cop movie. As an old fashionable movie star, his movies tend to keep the focus on him, and only 1982 FX-heavy Firefox could be said to be similar and that movie was very self-conscious about it (its climax even kept the star’s face covered). Instead, The Rookie presents itself as an elaborate action movie heavy on stunt work (the press release at the time claimed it employed more stuntmen than any other Hollywood movie), with multiple car chases and plenty of violent mayhem. It delivers on that; the chases in particularly are very careful staged and the destruction has some punch to it. On this, it is not much different than Another 48hrs, only Walter Hill is a good action director, so even in a minor movie like that, the clean action does tend to stand out while remaining integrated to everything else, while on The Rookie there seems to be to separate movies going on.
Eastwood might be following current trends, but at this point, he is hardly comfortable in such a register. Violence is a main subject in his movies, but reckless abandon and blunt action aren’t their territory. He is a very sober and somber filmmaker, indeed at his worst he can be a bit ponderous, and he takes every The Rookie cliché situation, and this movie is all cliched situations, fairly straight (when Eastwood gets introduced with a Black partner, we know the guy will be dead by the end of the first action scene, for instance). He can’t be bothered with the kind of easy going back and forth between the leads that a movie like Lethal Weapon 2 coasts on or play up the comic annoyance between them like Another 48hrs, the script asks Eastwood pairing with Charlie Sheen to be treated as equal, but not only Eastwood never bothers to develop chemistry between them, and his frustration at him is allowed to overwhelm the movie. Under better conditions, Eastwood can give the blander parts of his scripts a very tossed feel, the scenes that are there by necessity so we can get to the good stuff, but he can’t quite do this here as he is not connected to anything. The awful script has lots about Sheen’s character’s daddy issues and the need for Eastwood as a replacement father figure and the filmmaker overelaborates and underlines it all, making the movie even clunkier. He most let Sheen to drown there as well, it is the worst main performance in any of his movies. Compared to the far more enjoyable The Dead Pool, it constantly weighs down without anything that really sustains it.
In one of Eastwood’s most typical touches, the terrifically executed car chases all take place at night, and they are done in his trademark dark-light cinematography, so the great stuntman work is often taking place in a dark blur. For all the talk of Eastwood as a classical filmmaker and ultimate Hollywood insider, he is not known for changing paces in between movies. There is a look and feel for a Clint Eastwood movie, one he elaborates on through the 70s and 80s, and even something lightweight like Space Cowboys has a heavy melancholic feel to it. His movies rarely serve the system but take away from its resources. An assignment like this actually makes this process clear. So, The Rookie has great action presented in a very perverse manner, and it seems like it puts its violence and destruction upfront without ever being fully comfortable with it, but also never offers any commentary on it—the worst of both worlds. It is very possible The Rookie would be a more rewatchable movie if all those resources had be given to someone more willing to play the game, as it stands it is lousier, but more intriguing in all its flaws.
If The Rookie is remembered at all over three decades later, it is for the very odd scene later on, in which a captured Eastwood is sexually tortured by Sonia Braga. The Rookie is arguably the biggest part Braga got during her post-The Kiss of Spider Woman Hollywood days, her name is even in the trailer. It is a very regressive part: she is playing the near silent second in command of Raul Julia’s criminal, whose gender, overt sexuality and non-whiteness are supposedly to add on to dangerous exoticism. She finally gets her big scene, playing around the tied-down Eastwood. It goes on for over 5 minutes, with every bit of Eastwood’s submission underlined along with the voyeuristic touch that it is being shot by a local camera and reproduced on screens implicating the audience.
Eastwood’s early work, both as a filmmaker and a star, is packed with scenes of sexual abuse with an emphasis on the kinky power dynamics involved, he is, of course, usually the abuser. He problematizes it in some rich ways in the mid-80s on Tightrope, a movie he didn’t sign but by all accounts ghost directed, in which he played a cop with a taste for sadomasochism who ends up dealing with a serial killer that feels far too close to his fantasies, with pretend and real sexual violence allowed to be put into conflict. Those scenes mostly disappear from his filmmaking in his mature period, although sexual crimes are used in the background of multiple of his 90s movies (Unforgiven, Absolute Power, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), and the treat of violence against women remains a recurrent justification for action. Eastwood’s narcissism can show itself both in a certain unpleasantness, he as the otherworldly violent figure who hangs over the action, and paradoxically, in some masochism, often getting castigated by the violent world around him. The scene with Braga is rather uncomfortable and feels very disconnected from the movie around it, but it is the only time his imagination feels fully engaged. He offers his body as both an object of erotic contemplation and of narcissistic punishment. Curiously, he is never allowed much of payback, when Braga gets dispatched late, it is in a scene with Sheen.
It is fascinating that The Rookie was a payback for White Hunter, Black Heart, as those two movies couldn’t be more opposite, and not only because they suggest the budding ambitious auteur and the violent action hero. White Hunter is very much a movie about mid-20th century American machismo—let’s call it the Hemingway ideal—from which John Huston was arguably Hollywood’s most famous figure, its fantasies and its consequences. The ugly American is going to the third world for fun and more important fulfillment, letting destruction in his wake. In one of its better scenes, a drunk Eastwood (his Huston is by far his finest work as an actor) sees a white local mistreating a black waiter and decides to defend the latter, the noble cause suddenly a very good excuse for the thrill of some late-night violence. Eastwood doesn’t present any of this at a distance; it is clearly that cinema in general, and Hollywood specifically, is central to promoting such male fantasies, and Eastwood’s man with no name/Harry Callahan persona, far from divorced from it, is a late manifestation of the same. A very bitter pill presented with little distance, even less people saw White Hunter than Rookie, and it remains curiously lesser known compared to his early 90s celebrated movies despite being every bit as good.
Cut to The Rookie, which is pretty much that exactly male fantasy. A movie whose reckless violence has zero, personal or physical consequence, packed with scenarios when men get to prove themselves and predicted in the notion of its world as a playground so a little boy can learn through a positive violent figure to harness his own macho desires in a more productive way. There’s even an scene Sheen gets to destroy a biker’s bar just so to act out his frustrations. None of which is offered in much of the way of commentary. If the two movies offer any dialectic, it is for pure opposition. We often like to think of artists and people, in a way that is clear and easy to explain. After all, careers are supposed to progress instead of moving in often multiple directions, so Rookie shouldn’t come after White Hunter, Black Heart, but it does; indeed, that he can make a movie like The Rookie is probably why he can also make White Hunter. If distance can often be very important to observe some actions, so does proximity and the greatness of White Hunter, Black Heart, is tied to how well its filmmaker and star know so many of those impulses.
If one wants to complicate matters further, 1990 was also the year of one of Eastwood, the man, least defensible gestures, getting Warner to dump with little promotion his former long-term partner Sondra Locke second directed feature Impulse, a fine little thriller, in a clear “I giveth, I’m now taketh away” power move that wouldn’t be out of place inside either White Hunter or The Rookie. As an extra detail, Impulse two large male roles are played by Jeff Fahey and George Dzundza, the screenwriter/narrator and producer in White Hunter, which was shot just after it.
The Rookie was the last movie in which Eastwood played a Harry Callahan type, the one that mostly made his stardom in the previous two decades. He turned 60 during the filming, and he is obviously aging out of the action star phase, indeed his advanced age will be more often the focus from that point on (in 2002’s Blood Work, he stars as an FBI agent who has a heart attack in the opening scene and is forced into retirement). Never more will be the forceful with complicated hero who will act first and ask questions later, whatever he will show up as an authority figure is used as a failed and regretful father of some sort and after he started to direct only more often his movies will often cast younger actors like Kevin Bacon and Jeffrey Donovan as Eastwoodian cops with lots of his actorly tics but little or none of the positive effect he usually displayed.
The movie suggests an alternate history for Eastwood. One in which he got to age the way most male movie stars do. The script was ready to shoot until production was shutdown due to the 1988 Hollywood strike. It was supposed to be directed by stuntman turned director Craig R. Baxley, one of the many forgotten action filmmakers from the period who feels like someone who would handle this, and star Gene Hackman and Matthew Modine. It feels a lot like one of the many action movies Hackman did around this time in which his gravitas are used to prop an up-and-comer star. Lots of young actors, from Matt Dillon to Owen Wilson, got the Hackman push in the final two decades of his career. The Rookie often operates like this: Sheen is the title character, and while there’s a lot of focus on Eastwood’s usual antics, it is him who gets a developed background, psychological issues and careful thought arc. When Eastwood gets captured midway through the movie (again, the kind of thing that happens to the veteran lead in one of those), he disappears from the movie, save from a couple of quick check-in scenes, for some 20 minutes until the big Braga one, while the action is completely given to his young partner.
Sheen is the focus of the script, but Eastwood is the focus of the movie, because unlike Hackman, he has enough power to make sure no one, but Clint Eastwood is the star of a Clint Eastwood movie. It would be normal for Eastwood to age into more and more of those roles, that is how things are supposed to go, instead he crafted a new image as a respected filmmaker and use it to advanced his star persona into late age (two different Eastwood movies would go on to win the Oscars in the 15 years after The Rookie), indeed almost three decades later, in 2018, 14 years after Hackman retired due to lack of good roles, Eastwood made The Mule which is probably going to forever hold the distinction as the only sizeable hit headlined by an 88-year-old, He is current finishing a new directed movie Juror #2, he will be 94 next month.
In the alternate world proposed by The Rookie, things don’t go that way. In the final scene, Sheen arrives at the office to find out that Eastwood just got promoted to the new boss. Harry Callahan would never be a boss; the libertarian hero can’t stand bosses even if they work for the law and are well meaning, those are the people who care for rules and are always limiting them. Even in Eastwood’s later mature movies, this will still be true. But not in The Rookie, he and Sheen get to reenact their first meeting, with Sheen protesting his new female partner the way, Eastwood protested him early, so the transference can be complete. Eastwood can stay behind the desk, satisfied with his new semi-retired part. That is probably part of what makes The Rookie frustrating and interesting in equal measures, for once he is playing the game fairly straight with no attempt to find some balancing act, his skills might even function as a drawback, one can easily imagine the purposed Baxley/Hackman movie as significantly worse made and easier to like, but from these frustrations and the ugliness and dysfunction they often suggest can be instructive as well. Sometimes dealing with your favorite artists can be a matter of thinking about failure as much as success. Filmmaking isn’t a monolith, after all.
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