Gran Torino is a a tour de force for Clint Eastwood--the movie was produced directed and starred in by Eastwood. It is Clint playing Clint, with hints of all his poncho wearing, tobacco spitting, gun pulling past in spaghetti westerns.

He plays an old widowed war vet, living alone with his dog in a suburban house. He keeps his grounds neatly mowed, and his prized posession, a Gran Torino automobile, immaculate.
Gruff and hard nosed, he doesn't approve of his next door neighbors, a houseful of Hmong refugees he refers to as "gooks" and "zipper heads."

He finds the scrawny teenage Hmong boy stealing his prized car, part of an initiation ceremony into a tough Hmong street gang. One day Clint sees the teen and his sister being harassed on the street by some black thugs. He pulls over and slides out a gun, and the thugs leave cursing. He takes the boy under his wing and makes him work in the yard. The family overwhelm him with plants and food, which is a break from the beef jerky he's used to eating.

He grows fond of them. He has a problem-he is a smoker and is coughing up blood, he knows he's dying from lung cancer, but tells no one.
On his birthday, his son and dau.in law bring a cake and brochures for an assisted living facility, telling him to think about moving in one. He send them packing. When he phones his son's house, no one wants to talk to him. In the end, he decides to die by confronting the Hmong gang in front of witnesses--they shoot him to death, thinking he is armed, but he isn't. They're all jailed, and he wills the Gran Torino that everyone covets to the Hmong boy he has mentored.

Nice to watch once, but I'd rather see Clint in The Good The Bad and The Ugly. susil