Except for the fact that I’m willing to see it again, this might get me in trouble with my father. But after several intriguing previews in front of all the art house flicks I’ve been seeing in the past couple of months, I went to see Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Gran Torino. And it’s good! Eastwood still sees himself as incredibly bad-ass, which seems ridiculous for a 79 year-old man. Yet, either through weight of history, gravelliness of voice, or sheer force of will, he can still pull it off. Hell, the gravelly moans were as much an extra character in every scene as the titular vehicle was.

So Eastwood lives in his house in Detroit, in the neighborhood he hasn’t left since the Korean War ended, and he has gradually watched his friends move away or die and be replaced by a bunch of Asians that basically all look alike to him. His family is useless and his wife has just died, which leaves him a bitter racist, alone with nothing but time on his hands and his sweet, sexy sports car that he never drives. Oh, and his dog who is old like him, but I’m sure nothing bad will happen to, right? Right?

The downside to all this, if you leave out his existential twilight, non-stop racist anger, and the Catholic priest who won’t stop hanging on the bell day and night, is that there’s a Ricer gang terrorizing the neighbors (well, really the neighborhood in general, but he probably wouldn’t know if it weren’t happening in his front yard), and once he’s scared them off, he becomes the last thing he wants to be: a hero. After that, things start to get complicated.

There are moments of cringe-inducing uncomfortableness, genuine warmth, understated hilarity, and raw-edged fury. But as much good acting and scripting as was crammed into the film, I think what I like best about it is that it isn’t a story of redemption where the crusty old racist learns a valuable lesson and loves everyone. It might be cool if it happened in real life, but the truth is, that kind of thing mostly doesn’t, and I’ve seen it often enough on screen that it was refreshing to see something different. I think Eastwood-the-director only took the easy way out of a scene once in the entire film, and more power to him for it. I like movies that aren’t perfectly easy to watch or perfectly easy to pin down and categorize.