The ludicrous title “Cry Macho” is oddly perfect for this pitifully bad movie currently playing in theaters and on HBO Max — perfect because you kind of want to cry watching Clint Eastwood try to demonstrate that he’s still, at age ninety-one, both the toughest hombre around and catnip to all women.

For decades, Eastwood’s maniacal physical fitness made him a formidable-looking senior citizen. But now he’s truly a frail, elderly geezer, with thin, papery skin and wispy white hair, and that unmistakable old guy walk, stooped slightly forward, with legs wide and shuffling. His famously low, growling voice is shot. Now it’s a creaky, sketchy, faded old whisper that couldn’t possibly put any convincing menace into a line like “Go ahead, make my day.”

Yet here he is, still wheezing out attempts at menace and punching malefactors in the face and breaking wild horses that buck violently in a way that would fracture every fragile bone in his body if he were actually in the saddle, instead of his presumably much younger stuntman. He also tantalizes the women in the cast, who have to exhibit impossible emotions ranging from raw lust to deep romantic yearning for him.