The Mule (15)***

Dir: Clint Eastwood

With: Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Laurence Fishburne

Runtime: 116 minutes

CLINT Eastwood, 88 years young, assumes directing and starring duties once more in this based on a true story – aren’t they always – tale of a veteran in need of some extra cash who takes on a driving job. Eastwood plays Earl, the driver in question, as a man who has always placed the job first and the family second, a choice that has led to him not speaking to his daughter in decades.

Earl applies the same stickler attitudes to his role as a drug mule, but these are different times, and this is a very different business to anything he has experienced before. In this industry they don’t do written warnings. Despite the racy subject matter, The Mule moseys along at its own pace, not always to winning effect. The tone, meanwhile, is all over the place; it is never clear if we are supposed to warm to this character who “doesn’t have a filter”. Is he a latter-day Robin Hood, earning from the cartel and giving to good causes (including an open bar at his granddaughter’s wedding), a fool, or just a chancer seeing an opportunity to earn what he thinks is easy money? A supporting cast including Bradley Cooper as a DEA agent revolve around Eastwood. Though increasingly frail, he remains ever the star.

Destroyer (15)***

Dir: Karyn Kusama

With: Nicole Kidman, Scoot McNairy, Toby Kebbell

Runtime: 121 minutes

NICOLE Kidman gets down and grubby as a Los Angeles cop whose undercover operation goes horribly wrong, wrecking her life in the process. By the time we meet Erin Bell (Kidman) she is washed up, an embarrassment to her colleagues, and to her teenage daughter, who is herself going off the rails.

When a chance comes along to right a wrong of the past, Bell has just enough left in her tank to take up the opportunity, wherever it leads. Kidman wears the black leather jacket of the maverick cop as convincingly as anyone, the hair is mousy brown and flecked with grey, and her face is scrubbed bare. It is the kind of radical transformation that might have made her a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, but she came away from Tuesday's announcement with nothing. Ultimately, the character proves too much of a cliche. If you've listened to one maverick cop mumble their way through a tale, you have seen them all. More of a problem is director Karyn Kusama’s pacing, which is far too slow for what is supposed to be a thriller, and her frequent recourse to flashbacks drain what little energy there is left in the films. Nice try, but no cigar.