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Clint Eastwood's latest film has sparked talk of his impending retirement from film. But if anything, Gran Torino is proof positive that Eastwood sure as hell won't go gently into that dark night.

The contours are all-too-familiar, but in Gran Torino, Eastwood surprises by taking his iconic film presence in new, deeply-satisfying directions.

Clint Eastwood takes a deep look at race, violence and himself in Gran Torino. - photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Eastwood plays yet another steely-eyed, tough-talking American manly man, Walt Kowalski, a retired Detroit auto worker and Korean War vet whose wife has just died, leaving him utterly alone in the world – although his solitude, save for the company of his aging yellow Labrador Daisy, seems entirely by choice.

He won't talk to his money-grubbing, chubby kids, who call him only for favours and want to stick him in a retirement home, and he certainly won't have anything to do with his Hmong neighbours who, in his mind, have wrongfully taken over his block, leaving him the last white man on the street. And damned if he's going to give his house up, which he guards with a shotgun at the ready.

Speaking aloud in racial epithets unprintable here, Walt spends his days idling on his porch, swigging beer as he eyes his Asian neighbours with deep suspicion, flashing that familiar Eastwood scowl. He's Dirty Harry living off a pension, with a tinge of melancholy underneath it all.

As circumstances force him to deal with the immigrant family next door, the cracks in Walt's armour begin to show, and the deep prejudices that have informed his life begin to give way to – yep – compassion, but not in a TV-movie-of-the-week sort of way. This is Eastwood, after all.

Instead, Walt reluctantly takes the young man of the house – smart but mousy Thao (Bee Vang) – under his wing, giving him an education on how to be a man (read: working construction and learning how to dish out foul-mouthed expletives as expertly as Walt).

Through his exposure to Thao's family, who he grows to like more than his own selfish brood, Walt begins to smile and lighten up a bit, and in the initial scenes of ribbing between the two cultures, Eastwood's imminently likable persona elevates the film beyond its somewhat limited premise.

Eventually the film kicks into high gear, though, as Walt protects Thao against the unwanted advances of Asian gangbangers keen on recruiting Thao. Here the film becomes something more than just an expert character study. The familiar elements of Eastwood westerns emerge, leading to a final confrontation with the bad guys that ultimately poses the question: can the type of frontier justice that has governed the characters of Eastwood's past still apply in today's world? The answer is inevitable and devastating at the same time.

From a directing standpoint, the film is hardly perfect, hampered as it is by the same deficiencies present in all of Eastwood's films – an inherent lack of subtlety, an overabundance of clunky exposition and a heavy-handed use of metaphor. But Gran Torino stands out because it's willing to both poke fun at and seriously dissect the image upon which Eastwood's long career has rested.

At 78, Eastwood, with his recent prolific string of films, gives the appearance of a man in a big damn hurry, but he's just getting started. With each film, Eastwood has bravely tackled old subjects with renewed urgency and maturity: grief and vengeance (Mystic River), faith (Million Dollar Baby), heroism (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima) and, to arguably less success recently, police corruption (Changeling).

Gran Torino, in charting one man's willingness to embrace the new America that's staring him in the face, continues this fine cycle, prompting the question: what next, Clint?