Clint Eastwood's Career Hit Rock Bottom Before Unforgiven Rescued It

There are two ways of looking at Clint Eastwood's 1980s. One is to view them as an enshrinement. Eastwood turned 50 at the outset of the decade, and the movies were either mainstream-skewing victory laps or thoughtful departures; the star wasn't above coasting, but he made sure to carve out some time for personal projects about subjects that fascinated him (e.g. the country music drama "Honkytonk Man" and the Charlie Parker biopic "Bird"). Basically, Eastwood could do whatever he wanted at his home studio at Warner Bros., and sometimes he wanted to make "Pink Cadillac."

You can also view Eastwood's '80s as a waste of his time and talent. Of the 11 films he made over that 10-year span, only one was great ("Tightrope") , a few were above-average, and the rest were either misfires or outright garbage (I'm counting the Buddy Van Horn and Richard Tuggle collaborations, all of which were made with Eastwood's regular crew). Some argue that he needed the behind-the-camera reps to make his '90s and '00s triumphs, but the unhurried assurance and gruff soulfulness that elevates those movies was already present in "Play Misty for Me," "High Plains Drifter," and "The Outlaw Josey Wales." If anything, there are troubling signs of technical regression in "Sudden Impact" and stagnation in the others (save for "Bird").

Regardless of where you fall, Eastwood did not exactly swagger into the 1990s. The box office disappointment of "The Dead Pool" killed the Dirty Harry franchise for good (if you don't count the spiritual sequel that is "Gran Torino"), while "Pink Cadillac" was an embarrassingly failed attempt at another of Eastwood's good-'ol-boy action-comedies, one that no one was buying (especially on the opening weekend of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade").

No, Eastwood limped into the new decade, neither auteur nor bankable action star — and the latter realization might've rankled him enough to make what will hopefully forever be the worst film he's ever made.

Clint Eastwood's name still meant something above the title in 1990, but it was unclear to everyone — fans, critics, and even Clint himself — as to what that something was. His first film of the new decade was "Black Hunter, White Heart," a moody examination of a tortured, boozing artist that's stiff-limbed when it should surge like whitewater rapids. The movie earned mixed reviews at the time (it's since been positively reappraised, though I'm still split on it), and unsurprisingly turned off Eastwood's fan base. Where would he go from here? What made sense? A Western? His last at the time, "Pale Rider," was a solid if uninspired work, suggesting he was losing his interest in the genre. Another cop flick? Oh, hell, why not?

If Eastwood appeared to be cooling on Westerns, there seemed little doubt that he thought very little of the genre that made him an icon of American law and order after "The Dead Pool." The final Dirty Harry movie is hamstrung by a limp screenplay and listless direction in every department aside from the action — most notably the "Bullitt" car chase parody featuring Eastwood being stalked by an explosives-laden remote control car through the hilly streets of San Francisco. It also had the bad fortune to open the same month as "Die Hard," the ne plus ultra of the modern form. "The Dead Pool" lurched and wheezed by comparison.

Undeterred, Eastwood decided he could step up his action game with a buddy-cop movie in the vein of "Lethal Weapon." The formula suited him: big egos, bigger set pieces, lowbrow humor, and excessive violence. The screenplay did not. But if ever wondered what would happen if Eastwood made a film with Sam Raimi's longtime co-writer — replete with many of their oddball affectations — "The Rookie" is the nightmare you richly deserve.

The trouble with 'The Rookie" starts immediately with a nightmare of its own. David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen) is called before a review board tasked with deeming his mental fitness as an LAPD detective. He's a ramrod of a young officer, a recruiter's wet dream. But he's hiding a horrible secret, and, somehow, the panel knows it. They hammer at him about the tragic death of his brother, which he evidently brought about while engaged in some wildly dangerous, "Vertigo"-inspired horseplay. Ackerman wakes up in a cold sweat. His burden is our burden; we're going to be stuck watching a buddy-cop flick where one of the buddies is a humorless mess of repressed grief. Eastwood better be bringing more on-screen than he usually does to this party.

Eastwood tries. As Sergeant Nick Pulovski, he's a mess of cliched bad habits: he smokes cheap cigars, drinks on the job, and engages in the kind of police brutality that would become quite the problem for his department a year later. The problem here shouldn't be a problem, in that screenwriters Scott Spiegel and Boaz Yakin have written "The Rookie" as an absurdly stupid action-comedy that's both an inversion and parody of "Lethal Weapon." The old-timer is the loose cannon. Eastwood's got the right mischievous twinkle in his eye, but he seems unaware he's supposed to be zipping this along with the Looney Tunes energy of "Lethal Weapon 2." This results in a film that is deathly dull when the action dies down.

"The Rookie" has one old-school attribute, which is its dangerous-looking practical action set pieces (thanks to an A-plus stunt team coordinated by the great Terry Leonard). Alas, Eastwood blows his load with an auto-transport truck chase that crashes onto L.A.'s infamously cluttered 110 freeway, where the bad guys start unmooring cars one by one to throw into Pulovski's unmarked ride. It's a sensational sequence, one the film never comes close to touching over the next 100 minutes.

This sounds like just another bad '80s-'90s actioner, right? Let's talk about the bad guys.

Eastwood made the curious, could've-been-funny decision to cast the Puerto Rican Raul Julia and the Brazilian Sôfia Braga as a pair of sadistic German car thieves, but he has little interest in getting any kind of comedic mileage out of this. The situation must've been confusing for Julia, who gives an uncertain performance when he should be luxuriating in his character's villainy as he would do years later in his too-soon swan song "Street Fighter." Braga, meanwhile, plays a dominatrix of few words who tortures a restrained Puvlovski with a razor blade before essentially sexually assaulting him. This isn't played for laughs, but the subsequent battering of her is.

"The Rookie" is a film of mixed messaging. Spiegel and Yakin pretty obviously wrote this as a goof, down to the invoking of the Raimi-esque "you must taste blood to become a man" conversion of Ackerman from by-the-book rook to due-process-flouting madman. The scene in which Ackerman returns to the Mexican bar where he took a beating earlier to return the favor with considerable interest (he cracks skulls and brawls with attack dogs before burning the establishment to the ground) would've made for a tremendous Bruce Campbell freakout in Raimi's hands. Sheen, a year off his immensely satisfying portrayal of Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn in "Major League," could've delivered on this count, but he looks reined in.

Eastwood saves the worst for last with an airport shootout that ends with the needless extrajudicial murder of Julia's sleazebag. We're a long way from the killing of Scorpio in "Dirty Harry." We're meant to cheer Puvlovski's decision. Eastwood is usually very smart and purposeful when he's subverting genre tropes, but here he just seems to be chucking red meat to the vigilante-worshippers who beat their hands bloody at the make-my-day heroics of "Sudden Impact."

"The Rookie" is dark, nasty, and wholly unworthy of Eastwood. After the box office failure of this (which had the surprising misfortune to open the same day as "Home Alone") and his two stabs at serious drama — "Bird" and "White Hunter, Black Heart" — Eastwood seemed lost. Factor in "The Dead Pool" and "Pink Cadillac," and that's five bum movies in a row. Where could he go?

In a January 1991 interview with the British host, Terry Wogan timed to the UK release of "The Rookie," Eastwood was asked if he'd like to make another Western. He did and he had the screenplay picked out, one he'd been holding onto for five years. He was going to take some time off and shoot it the following year.

Perhaps Eastwood wasn't sweating that run because "Unforgiven" was always wedged in his back pocket. This does not, however, explain the whole of the 1980s. From the outside, those who expected better of Eastwood had a legitimate reason to wonder if he'd stopped expecting it of himself. The likely answer is that the commercial, critical, and Oscar success of "Unforgiven" set him free from the one-for-them films that bought him the opportunity to make movies like "Bird." Now he could do anything on his own terms, which, going forward, tended to be shockingly affordable. "The Rookie" was the end of ugly Clint, and I'm so glad he's gone for good.