The road is full of gaping potholes when you're a pristine '70s muscle car. The white trash want to go Hicksville across your fenders with their tasteful flame decals. If you're lucky enough to be owned by a gook, your roadholding will be top-notch courtesy of a very large, and very gay spoiler. And if it's a spook in the driver's seat, well then, those spinners are the sheeeyit, brudda!

Welcome to the world of Korean vet Walt Kowalski, who by his own admission knows more about dying than living. The 78-year-old Eastwood takes to the role with gusto in his swansong as an actor, much like fellow geriatric Jack Nicholson did in 'About Schmidt' and 'As Good As It Gets'. He is all quivering upper lip and wields his acerbic tongue like bayonet as the weathered demon of Middle America discrimination whose passion for all but the prized Ford Gran Turino he helped build has long since dried up.

His wait for death is however interrupted by the fateful arrival of a Korean teenager after a botched gang initiation. The two become firm friends — the older teaching his charge how to be a man in the traditional Marlboro man sense and deal with the gangbangers in the fast deteriorating suburb.

Until inevitably, time and exposure lead him to make the cold sweat observation these that 'these gooks are more like me than my own family.' Kowalski's sheer range of racial slurs is a cause for much hilarity, especially in a particularly droll when he takes on some neighbourhood punks and his repeated rebuttals of a Catholic priest's attempts to bring him to confession.

Eastwood donning the director's hat leads a perfectly paced and vital plot through to a poignant climax heavy with symbolism. The complexities of race relations in an evolving US are filtered through the tinseltown prism and buffed and polished like a vintage car. There will be knowing nods and wry smiles as Eastwood assumes the guises of that gunfighter with no name, Dirty Harry and other roles from his extensive repertoire.

It's not very often that a cinema audience remains transfixed by a film until the lights come on, but that’s exactly what happened as the credits rolled on Eastwood's storied acting career to the backdrop of his own rasping vocals. We have been lucky.

See an exclusive clip from 'Gran Torino'