It’s a big year for old men pulling off wild crimes. Robert Redford is an old man with a gun, and Clint Eastwood is an even older man with a bunch of drugs in his trunk.

Eastwood’s The Mule looks like the gritty reboot of The Old Man and the Gun; while David Lowery’s film is sweet and charming, the first trailer for Eastwood’s latest looks extremely dour with a lot less smiling and flirting. Serving as director and star, Eastwood plays Earl Stone, an octogenarian with a foreclosure looming in his future. Desperate for cash, he takes a mysterious driving job that turns out to be a drug courier gig for a Mexican cartel. The film reunites Eastwood with his American Sniper star Bradley Cooper, who plays a DEA agent on the man’s trail.

Here’s the full synopsis:

Eastwood stars as Earl Stone, a man in his 80s who is broke, alone, and facing foreclosure of his business when he is offered a job that simply requires him to drive.  Easy enough, but, unbeknownst to Earl, he’s just signed on as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel.  He does well—so well, in fact, that his cargo increases exponentially, and Earl is assigned a handler.  But he isn’t the only one keeping tabs on Earl; the mysterious new drug mule has also hit the radar of hard-charging DEA agent Colin Bates.  And even as his money problems become a thing of the past, Earl’s past mistakes start to weigh heavily on him, and it’s uncertain if he’ll have time to right those wrongs before law enforcement, or the cartel’s enforcers, catch up to him.

The film is based on a 2014 story from the New York Times Magazine – hey, Lowery’s movie was also based on a magazine story. The rest of the cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Michael Peña, Dianne Wiest, Andy Garcia, Alison Eastwood, Taissa Farmiga, Ignacio Serricchio, Loren Dean, Eugene Cordero. The Mule opens December 14, less than a year since Eastwood’s last movie (which I was not a fan of).

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