I suppose it would be redundant to mention that almost half a century after he first appeared in films (as, it says here, an uncredited lab technician in Revenge of the Creature (from the Black Lagoon)), Clint Eastwood has become a competent and versatile actor and director. Strange, I never much cared for him as Rowdy Yates (the TV series Rawhide which I watched from time to time during my last year or so of high school) or even as Harry Callahan (the Dirty Harry movies), but in recent years he has sort of grown on me, in roles ranging from aging Secret Service agent (In the Line of Fire) to aging good-hearted burglar (Absolute Power) to aging aerospace engineer (Space Cowboys) to, here, aging retired FBI agent.

Terry McCaleb (Eastwood) is a high-profile profiler for the FBI, currently engaged in the search for the bloody serial butcher known as the “Code Killer” — so-called for the encoded messages he leaves at crime scenes for McCaleb (three three-digit code groups, always the same, followed by a verbal thumbing of the nose). Called to the scene of a double, or perhaps triple, murder (no one is quite sure; apparently the body parts are too intermixed), he sights what he believes (correctly) is the perp in a crowd of media people and takes off after him. McCaleb, like Eastwood, appears to be in his seventies, and after about six blocks of high-speed foot chase, jumping over fences, and the like, keels over with a heart attack, though he manages to put a bullet or two into his quarry before losing consciousness.

Jump to two years later; McCaleb has just been given a heart transplant, after being two years on a waiting list (he apparently has an extremely rare blood type). His doctor (Anjelica Huston) is adamant that he take life easy, but Graciella Rivers (Wanda de Jesus), a young Latina woman, has other ideas; McCaleb is now “wearing” the heart of her sister, who was gunned down in what was apparently a convenience-store robbery, and she wants McCaleb to track down the killer for her. McCaleb, of course, is now retired, but his conscience won’t let him stand aside, and soon — and in danger of overexerting himself — he finds that, in fact, there is far more to the apparently casual killing of Graciella’s sister than anybody supposes, that there was at least one more similar killing a few weeks earlier, that the two killings may be related, and that somehow McCaleb himself is deeply involved.

I won’t say much more for fear of giving things away; unlike In the Line of Fire (where the audience knows the identity of the villain but Eastwood doesn’t) or Absolute Power (in which both the audience and Eastwood know who the villains are, and the problem is simply to get at them without getting killed), in this film neither the audience nor Eastwood know the identity of the killer, though the scriptwriter plays fair and explicitly gives the audience all the clues it needs to figure out the secret more than a quarter of an hour before Eastwood does. Warning, though; I figured it out within the first half-hour of the film, on intuition alone, and I suspect others will as well.

Also interesting are Eastwood’s interactions with the people around him: Graciella; her orphaned nephew Raymond (Mason Lucero), who provides a vital clue at one point; boat bum Jasper “Buddy” Noone (Jeff Daniels) who lives aboard a boat moored just down from Eastwood’s boat-home and whom Eastwood drafts as a driver; sympathetic Sheriff’s deputy Jaye Winston (Tina Lifford) whom McCaleb has helped in the past, and who is glad to return the favor; unsympathetic LAPD detective Ronaldo Arrango (Paul Rodriguez), who sees McCaleb only as a media hog.

I won’t necessarily recommend that you race down to your cineplex to see this film — from the looks of things, if you don’t hurry you may not get the chance (it opened on one screen at Century 16, compared to four for the obnoxious-looking XXX; and when I went to see it, the seating was far from full) — but you’ll probably want to at least rent it when it comes out on tape or DVD, and you may even want it for your permanent library. Well, at least if you like Eastwood.