Critical response Rotten Tomatoes reports that 81% of 237 surveyed critics gave
Gran Torino positive write-ups; the average score is 7.10/10. The site's consensus states: "Though a minor entry in Eastwood's body of work,
Gran Torino is nevertheless a humorous, touching, and intriguing old-school parable." At
Metacritic, which assigns a
weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 72 based on 34 reviews. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. After seeing the film,
The New York Times described the
requiem tone captured by the film, calling it "a sleek, muscle car of a movie made in the USA, in that industrial graveyard called Detroit".
Manohla Dargis compared Eastwood's presence on film to
Dirty Harry and the
Man with No Name, stating: "Dirty Harry is back, in a way, in
Gran Torino, not as a character, but as a ghostly presence. He hovers in the film, in its themes and high-caliber imagery, and of course, most obviously, in Mr. Eastwood's face. It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood."
Roger Ebert wrote that the film is "about the belated flowering of a man's better nature. And it's about Americans of different races growing more open to one another in the new century." Sang Chi and Emily Moberg Robinson, editors of
Voices of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander Experience: Volume 1, said that within the mainstream media, the film received "critical acclaim" "for its nuanced portrayal of
Asian Americans." Louisa Schein and Va-Megn Thoj, authors of "
Gran Torinos Boys and Men with Guns: Hmong Perspective," said that the mainstream critical response was "centered on Eastwood's character and viewed the film mainly as a vision of multicultural inclusion and understanding." Nicole Sperling, columnist for
Entertainment Weekly, called it a drama with "the commercial hook of a genre film" and described it further as "a meditation on tolerance wrapped in the disguise of a movie with a gun-toting Clint Eastwood and a cool car". Chi and Robinson said that within the Asian-American community, some criticized "depictions of Hmong men" and "the archetypical
white savior trope that permeated the film". Tou Ger Xiong, a Hmong storyteller and performance artist from the
Minneapolis-St. Paul area who had auditioned for a role in the film, said that he had respect for the film because the producers actually cast Hmong instead of asking other Asian-Americans to mimic Hmong.Brauer said that in an opinion editorial released in 2011, Vang "isn't kind to the Clint Eastwood film". Philip W. Chung of
AsianWeek said that Eastwood, portraying a white man, was the "main weapon" of the film even though screenwriter
Nick Schenk "does his best to portray Hmong culture and the main Hmong characters with both depth and cultural sensitivity". Chung argued that "
Gran Torino might have been another "'white man saves the day' story" but that "What Eastwood has really created is not a story about the white man saving the minority (though it can be read on that level and I'm sure some will) but a critical examination of an iconic brand of white macho maleness that he played a significant part in creating." Clint Eastwood's performance has also garnered recognition. He won an award for Best Actor from the
National Board of Review, he was nominated for the
Broadcast Film Critics Association (Critics' Choice Awards) and by the
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards for Best Actor. An original song from the film, "Gran Torino" (performed by
Jamie Cullum), was nominated for the
Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. The
Art Directors Guild nominated
Gran Torino in the contemporary film category. The film, however, was ignored by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the
81st Academy Awards when it was not nominated for a single Oscar, which led to heated criticism from many who felt that the academy had also deliberately snubbed
Revolutionary Road and
Changeling (which Eastwood also directed) from the five major categories. In 2010, the film was named
Best Foreign Film at the
César Awards in
France.
Derivative works Mark D. Lee and Cedric N. Lee, two
Hmong filmmakers from Detroit, directed a documentary called
Gran Torino: Next Door, about how
Bee Vang and Ahney Her were chosen for their roles in the film and the Hmong actors' off-set activities. It was released on
Blu-ray. Vang acted in a
YouTube parody of one scene in
Gran Torino, titled "
Thao Does
Walt: Lost Scenes from Gran Torino." The YouTube parody addresses a scene involving a barbershop, and the views of masculinity in the original scene. == Impact ==