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Sun 2 August 2026 17:19, UK

Any actor or filmmaker with a decades-long career will always make a few missteps along the way; such is the nature of the business. As somebody who mastered both and pinballed between them with increasing regularity, Clint Eastwood was more at risk of stumbling than most.

For the most part, though, his filmography has remained remarkably solid. Having been performing for over 70 years and directing for north of 50, if anything, it’s surprising that Eastwood hasn’t been involved in more wretched abominations than he has. Even at that, he’s made bad films, but nothing that could be branded as a genuine crime against cinema.

Nobody’s perfect, of course, even if the finger of blame for one of his weakest efforts can be pointed squarely at Steven Spielberg. The four-time Academy Award winner didn’t act in the movie, but there’s no point in even trying to deny that he hasn’t helmed too many pictures worse than 2010’s Hereafter.

One thing Eastwood has largely tended to avoid throughout his career is fantasy, with his stories on either side of the camera opting to keep their feet firmly on the ground of reality. In that respect, he should be commended for making such a drastic departure, even if the results indicated he wasn’t cut out for it.

Narrative ambition is another aspect of cinema that’s hardly been an Eastwood hallmark, so having the famously efficient auteur take the reins of a supernaturally-tinged drama with three parallel storylines was realistically only going to go one of two ways. Unfortunately, it didn’t go the good way.

Matt Damon plays a clairvoyant who no longer wants to communicate with the dead, Cecile de France plays a journalist who survives a near-death experience, and Frankie and George McLaren play Jason and Marcus, twin brothers severed by tragedy. To put it lightly, it’s not very Eastwoodesque, but even icons find it hard to say no to Spielberg. 

The fabled director is capable of turning the plainest of stories into something truly magical, and that worked in opposition to Eastwood’s own style. The best way to separate the two men is with a somewhat necessary food analogy. Spielberg is a gravy man, he pours warm molten meaty goodness all over his stories, turning them into the kind of comfort capable of laying a man up onhis couch for weeks at a time. Eastwood is a steak on the grill type of man, perhaps a dash of salt and pepper, but that’s about it. Both are great meals, but served in very different ways.

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor

It means that when somebody queued up to purchase their ticket for the latest Eastwood venture, they were expecting the sizzle of meat on the grill and not the schlocky heft of a full roast. Hereafter, therefore, became a blot on Eastwood’s otherwise sparkling clean style sheet as his and Spielberg’s styles clashed, leaving fans fairly undernourished.

“Steven Spielberg called me one day and said, ‘I have a script I’d love to send over to you’. And I said, ‘Fine, send it over’. He and I had worked together on a few other projects,” came Eastwood’s typically blunt explanation to Time Out. “I read it, and I liked it. So, I just called him back and said, ‘I’ll do it’. There were a few little ideas I had, but I just put those in the back of my head.”

It’s not often he works as a director-for-hire with little input, but Eastwood ploughed ahead with Hereafter after shelving his own thoughts on contributing to the story. Whether that was the wrong call remains up for debate, but what can’t be argued is that it’s comfortably sitting among the bottom tier of his filmmaking credits.

That’s the power of Spielberg in a nutshell; he wants to send Eastwood the script, and Eastwood ends up shooting the script without even trying to put his own stamp on it. To be honest, it was a waste of both, with the line between mawkish sentimentality and spiritual hokum blurring into an indistinguishable mess of tedium.

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