You can figure out the pivotal clue in Blood Work if not by the title alone--which gives altogether too much away--then surely come the thirty-minute mark. You can deduce the identity of the murderer as soon as he saunters on screen, and you can predict the love story almost before it happens just by dint of the kind of movie that Blood Work is. The only thing you can't figure out is why Clint Eastwood, who sometimes makes interesting movies like Bird, A Perfect World, White Hunter, Black Heart, and the magnificent Unforgiven, almost as often makes boring, predictable, prosaic movies like The Rookie (1990), Absolute Power, True Crime and now Blood Work.

McCaleb (Eastwood) is a grizzled FBI profiler on the trail of a serial murderer called "The Code Killer" when he's suddenly stricken by a heart attack. Flash forward two years and the now-retired McCaleb, two months from a heart transplant, is living on a boat, enjoying the good life between invasive check-ups and lectures from his stern doctor (Anjelica Huston). Into his post-operative bliss (punctuated by enough prescription pills to choke Carrie Fisher) comes mysterious Graciela (the awful Wanda De Jesus), claiming that McCaleb's new ticker is the former property of her sister Glory, murdered during a liquor store hold-up. Naturally, Graciela wants McCaleb to solve Glory's murder; naturally, Glory's orphaned moppet (Mason Lucero) will come up with a pivotal plot point before being imperilled; and naturally, Jeff Daniels will play a lovable next-boat neighbour to provide peculiarly ineffective (and wholly unnecessary) comic relief. Surprising to no one, it all ends with a shootout and a jazzy fade-out.

Blood Work is a clockwork, lock-step, shake-and-bake thriller that has nothing new to offer the genre and just enough Eastwood star moments to turn it into a sad but not altogether unwatchable experience. It is marked by the director's lugubrious pacing and laudable attention to character development but fatally hindered by secondary performances running the gamut from Daniels' "The Dude" sleepwalk to De Jesus' stony import to Paul Rodriguez's impossibly pitched rival Mexican detective. The whole thing plays to the pathetic with "are you okay" the question most asked of our septuagenarian hero. Give Eastwood credit for playing a character his age; ponder the plausibility of a seventy-year-old avenging angel character in the first place.

The professionalism of the direction does little to mask the banality of the product. Save for an interesting prison metaphor for boats at dock, some amusingly perverse product placement (wonder how much Converse paid to have their shoe the athletic wear of choice for sadistic psychopaths), and some nice noir lighting during an otherwise meaningless scene, Blood Work washes out as a thrill-less thriller and a "mystery" aimed at the "Murder, She Wrote" demographic. For as frustrating as it is, it's not often flat-out awful (excepting Eastwood's affection for simpering Asian characters; see also Absolute Power), and by the end Blood Work even manages for long stretches to cast a worn-out calliope spell just by virtue of its determination to take its own sweet time in getting the characters caught up to where its audience has leapt ahead long before. A great shame that Eastwood, an artist of intelligence and an actor of presence, appears to have resigned himself to laggard formula dreck for what is now, by my count, the sixth time in a row; here's hoping the upcoming Mystic River isn't lucky number seven.-Walter Chaw