The Mule Movie Summary, Story Line, Reviews, Ratings and Release Date

The Mule [2018] Full HD Movie Download

Broke, alone and facing foreclosure on his business, 90-year-old horticulturist Earl Stone takes a job as a drug courier for a Mexican cartel. His immediate success leads to easy money and a larger shipment that soon draws the attention of hard-charging DEA agent Colin Bates. When Earl's past mistakes start to weigh heavily on his conscience, he must decide whether to right those wrongs before law enforcement and cartel thugs catch up to him.

Initial release: December 14, 2018 (USA)

Director: Clint Eastwood

Box office: $68.8 million

Budget: 50 million USD

Producer: Clint Eastwood

It was a D.E.A. Special Agent named Jeff Moore who found Leo Sharp. He’d busted a small-time dealer carrying 2 kg of cocaine, and he’d pressed him to talk until he’d led him to Ramon Ramos, the bookkeeper for the Sinaloa Cartel.

Ramos cracked. He offered to tell the D.E.A. everything he knew if they’d give him protection and soon he was taking them to the scenes of pickups where more than $2 million changed hands.

At first, Moore was sure he was watching a once-in-a-lifetime drug trade, but this, Ramos assured him, was routine business for the cartel. Their best courier, the man known only as “Tata,” moved enough drugs to bring them $2 million in cash on his own every month.

The Mule is based on the true story of Leo Sharp, which was chronicled in The New York Times by Sam Dolnick; the film was written by Nick Schenk, who also scripted Gran Torino. Here, Sharp has been renamed Earl Stone, but his story is essentially the same. He’s a war veteran and a horticulturist (one particularly famous for his flowers’ vibrant colors) who becomes a drug runner in his late 80s at the behest of a Mexican drug cartel. His advanced age, years of experience driving around the country, and a spotless criminal record lead him to become one of the cartel’s most prized assets.

We first meet Earl in 2005, when he skips his daughter’s wedding to go to a horticulturist convention and bask in the adoration of his fellow flower-growers. Then the movie jumps forward 12 years. Earl has lost his farm, the business having shifted to e-commerce florists — “Damn internet, it ruins everything,” he mutters — and he’s lost his family, too. His ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest) and appropriately named daughter Iris (Eastwood’s real-life daughter, Alison) won’t speak to him. Only Iris’s daughter Ginny (Taissa Farmiga) keeps in touch.

He’s skeptical at first, but he finds that he enjoys the trips and especially the money. It lets him pay for the open bar at Ginny’s wedding, renovate the local VFW hall, buy a new truck, and start to work his way back into the lives of his estranged family. He likes the travel, which takes him several states away from his home in Peoria, Illinois. He likes the food. He likes the sights. And he likes the encounters he tends to have along the way. (Earl has not one but two threesomes with buxom young women during this movie.)

Now, the story of Leo Sharp will reach a wider audience than ever before thanks to Clint Eastwood’s forthcoming film The Mule. Eastwood treats Sharp as a sort of antihero, a regret-stricken man struggling to get out of the business, caught while making one last run.

The real Sharp, however, didn’t show quite so much regret. When the judge handed down his sentence, Sharp said: “I’m really heartbroken I did what I did, but it’s done” – but that single, polite statement was about the extent of his remorse.

“All God’s plants that cheer people up are created for a purpose: to take depressed peoples’ minds and make them feel good,” Sharp told a reporter at another time. As far as he was concerned, delivering cocaine was no different from delivering daylilies. He was sharing a plant that made people feel good.

While Eastwood has made plenty of intense thrillers in his day, The Mule is fairly laid-back. Even with a languid Cooper (and a similarly relaxed Michael Peña as his partner) on Earl’s tail, the whole thing plays like a road movie, trotting along to its sad but inevitable conclusion as Earl tries to make up for decades of neglect with wads of cash. The dusty cities and towns he’s driving through are casualties of the same tragic abandonment that his own family suffered. As a result, this movie is as much a eulogy for a country that Eastwood sees as slowly crumbling as it is for the life Earl chose to lead.

But drug running is rarely, if ever, truly easy, even for a guy like Earl. There’s drama in the cartel leadership, headed by a suave guy at the top (Andy Garcia). And two DEA agents (Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña) are closing in on Earl. Things start to head south — especially when tragedy strikes, and Earl has to choose between work and family once again.

He didn’t go through with his promise. Sharp went to prison, though he only served a year of his sentence before he was pulled out because of a terminal illness. He died in Dec. 2016, shortly after being released, at the age of 92.

The daylilies are gone. Today, Leo Sharp’s farm lies empty. Nothing but bare patches of brown dirt remain in what was once a brightly-colored field of flowers, bursting in full bloom.

There are many (many, many) moments in which Earl rants about the kids and their cell phones these days. A small sampling: “That’s the problem with this generation — can’t open a fruit box without calling the internet.” “That would work a lot better if you got that goddamn phone out of your hand.” “I don’t know what it is with you guys and your generation. Don’t you guys live life outside the goddamn phone?” You get it.

Time and again, Earl picks his career and the freedom of the open road over familial commitment, which leaves him with few options when his home is foreclosed on. The Mule is set in Peoria, Illinois, which Eastwood depicts as increasingly desolate, much like Gran Torino’s Detroit. One secondary plot line sees Earl using his earnings to reopen a shuttered Veterans of Foreign Warshall, basking in the praise he gets as a result. Meanwhile, he can barely remember to attend the birthday parties his children invite him to.

Earl is also the kind of old guy who utters casually racist or homophobic slurs right to people’s faces, and then when he’s called out, doesn’t apologize so much as express surprise that he’s not supposed to say stuff like that. (“Well, shit,” he says in wonderment, after a black couple kindly corrects him when he uses a racist slur while helping them with a flat tire.)

Earl is obviously able to change — the whole movie is about him learning and growing — but it’s not totally clear what all of these moments are doing in the movie, other than attempting to add some sort of levity. They don’t feel wanton so much as half-baked and poorly conceived; they aren’t doing any storytelling work.

That’s somewhat predictable in a film where any Latino characters are either associated with the drug cartel or one-note sketches. The same goes for the film’s women, Earl’s family, who don’t have much to do except be mad at him or forgive him.