I’m going to talk about titles for a minute because Cry Macho is the worst movie title I’ve seen since Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. A title shouldn’t just be two random words smushed together. Let me demonstrate: cry is a verb and macho is an adjective. For fun, I went to the web, summoned outputs from a random verb generator and a random adjective generator, and I swear to you, these are the first three titles the programs generated:
Fence Evasive
Queue Dirty
Part Plastic
You’ll note that each one of these is better than Cry Macho. I really want to see Queue Dirty; it sounds very. I’d like to say Cry Macho compensated for its terrible title, but truth be told, the ill-considered mess on screen exactly reflected the care that went into the ill-considered naming convention used.
Mike Milo (producer/director/fossil Clint Eastwood) is a forcibly retired ex-bronco buster. His either current or ex-boss (can’t say the movie was clear on the leverage here), Howard (Dwight Yoakam), forces Mike to go to Mexico to claim and return with Howard’s estranged son, Rafo (Eduardo Minett), who currently lives with his mother, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), a local cartel kingpin of sorts.
Now I’ve named four characters in the above paragraph, and for the first hour of film, I loathed all four of them.
Rafo is a “wild” child, and by that I mean in Clint Eastworld sometimes he says “no.” Mike finds Rafo at the cock fights, which sounds wild and dangerous, but this has to be the most pristine, sanitized cock ring in history. Watch out! That’s a bale of hay! Tell me, was the set director late for prom at the time of shooting? Anyhoo, Rafo champions his own rooster, “Macho.” (Half the film’s title comes from this future set of McNuggets) Legend has it that Macho wasn’t much of a contender in the cock fighting arena and lost several bouts until Rafo Miyagi’d the bird into greatness.
Seriously?
Wait. Now maybe I don’t know anything about cock fights. After all, I’ve never been to one, nor do I see that on my bucket list, but … I was under the impression that these animals fight to kill. The loser gets eaten. That’s it. There is no “minor league” for cocks to pay their dues and work their way up to the bigs. The animals fight until one dies or is too injured to continue. This is why it is animal cruelty. If dog fighting proceeded in a way that the dogs came out, circled for a while and jabbed at each other with gloves, that might be sanctioned.
So anyway, Mike tells Leta that he’s contacted Rafo and it’s time to go home and then she’s pissed that he won’t sleep with her so she threatens federales on him and he leaves. Meanwhile, Rafo sneaks into Mike’s car, which he discovers when Macho says “hi” from the back seat. When Mike tells Rafo to get lost, he threatens federales on Mike.
And you can see how this all appeals to the worst thoughts of the Eastwood crowd: cock fights, cartels, federales, Mexican jail, etc. Cry Macho presents two Mexicos in the film, the one Trumpers constantly fear, where gangs and theft and criminality are a way of life … and the real Mexico, where people actually live. Unfortunately, the film makes 
the latter awkward as well by having Mike just decide to stop his (and I’m not kidding here) randomly stolen car in a random town because “it looks nice.” Aren’t you guys on the run from federales? Aren’t you supposed to be back in Texas?
And … cuz “it looks nice?” Did the screenwriter have the day off to go to prom with the set director? WTF, Clint?
Oh, it gets better when Mike meets the owner of the local eatery, who immediately falls for him. I’m not kidding here … we’ve met exactly two women in this film and BOTH wanted to sleep with ninety (90!) year-old Clint Eastwood. What turned you on, babe? Was it his ability to amble forward without a walker? His driver’s license? His days-of-the-week pill collection? His need to nap in the diner booth?
This is a painfully bad film. There isn’t a single scene that rings true. A potential gun battle is broken up by an enforcement rooster. Over the course of two hours, Cry Macho slowly evolves from “Grandpa After Dark” to “All Creatures Grande y Pequeño.” Of course, we knew it would suck when we saw the title. The film was clearly written for a forty year-old-Eastwood, but a forty-year-old Eastwood wouldn’t have made it any better. Clint Eastwood has made many, many quality films in his lifetime, but this one is so awful I fear that Clint’s time as an artist is finally, reluctantly, over. It’s time to keep your Macho cock under wraps, gramps.
Thought I had it bad with Meet the Fockers
But this thing may as well be about knockers
I don’t need a booster
For this cinematic rooster
What I need is a sequel to Cock Blockers
Rated PG-13, 104 Minutes
Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: Nick Schenk, N. Richard Nash
Genre: Movies you make when you’ve forgotten how to make movies
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: How into Clint Eastwood are you?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Everybody else
