Okay kids, when it comes to your cinema choices this week you have a very simple choice to make.  You can waste your money and go see The Day Keanu Stood Still or, you can make the smart decision and head off to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino.  Stupid decision or smart decision, it's all up to you.

There has been a run of old action films revisiting and deconstructing their glory years lately - Stallone, obviously, with both Rambo and Rocky Balboa and Jean Claude Van Damme with JCVD - and in some ways its hard not to see Eastwood's Gran Torino in that same light: Eastwood, in what is largely rumoured to be his final acting performance, taking one last kick at the hard-ass can.

Given that Eastwood has never been shy about embracing his age - he actually waited years to shoot Unforgiven, waiting for his looks to be old and beat up enough to match the part. I'm not entirely certain that's a fair comparison to make but herein the ass is indeed hard.

Eastwood is Walt Kowalski, an embittered Korean War vet who we first meet standing stoically next to his wife's coffin at their funeral. His children neglect him. His once proud middle class neighborhood has been over run by immigrants and slid into poverty. His priest is little more than a tiresome child. If there's anything Kowalski actually likes in life it's his dog and as for the rest of it all there is to do is sigh and groan and glare and deliver a constant stream of racist abuse. He is, in short, the classic crusty old man.  Everything was better when he was young, apparently, and considering that when he was young he was sent overseas to kill people, that aint saying much.

But things are about to change for Walt in a very odd way. The attempted theft of his beloved, mint condition 1972 Gran Torino leads to Walt having an adopted family of sorts, an unlikely bond formed between the cranky vet and the Asian youths next door - kids he refers to as zipperheads and gooks even once he's on good terms with them. This leads to a sort of surrogate family relationship. But family can be demanding and local gang pressures on the kids lead inevitably to a bloody confrontation between gang bangers and the geriatric hard ass.

At the outset it feels like the casting is a bit off on Gran Torino. Eastwood himself is enormously charismatic - this is one powerhouse of a performance from him that could very easily lead to some serious awards recognition - but the others, not so much. Performances seem a little off from several of the key players - particularly the young priest - but as the film progresses that sort of rough, unpolished quality started to fit with the aesthetic of the picture so well that I began to wonder if Eastwood had perhaps cast non-actors to boost the authenticity of the picture. That turns out not to have been the case for the priest but both of the primary Asian youth are indeed appearing here in their first ever screen roles.

So there you have it. Crappy and unnecessary remake of a scifi classic or Clint Eastwood with a rifle. The choice seems clear.