Beware The Glare.

Stickup artists, hijackers, killers and other lowlifes have become well acquainted with it over the years ... just before being blasted into eternity by “Dirty Harry” Callahan or The Man with No Name or any of a host of other tough hombres Clint Eastwood has played over the years.

The Glare is a look that, if looks could kill, looks like it could reduce anyone catching the full brunt of it to a smoking stump of charred protoplasm.

Eastwood gives The Glare the most extensive workout of his career in “Gran Torino.” In his latest directorial effort everyone feels its wrathful rays: his character’s offspring, the parish priest, assorted street punks, next-door neighbors, little old ladies. Nobody is immune.

His character answers to the name Walt Kowalski but you can think of him as Harry Callahan, in retirement. Same aura of lanky menace. Same antisocial attitudes. Same racism. He’s a deep-dyed meanie, is Walt, the distilled embittered essence of every angry guy Eastwood has ever played.

A Korean War vet, retired Michigan autoworker and newly minted widower (his wife’s funeral opens the picture), Walt behaves with such unmodulated venom that it’s almost as though Eastwood is parodying all other signature characters that have defined his screen persona over the years. No one, you think, can be this much of a grouch all the time.

And you would be right. Walt, the surly so-and-so, is clearly in need of a measure of redemption. But who will help him attain it? Not the priest, played by Christopher Carley, who looks like a fresh-faced choir boy and speaks in soothing touchie-feelie tones that make Walt’s skin crawl. Macho Walt hates touchie-feelie.

And not his grown sons and their families. They just want to pop him into a retirement village and sell the family home in a decaying Detroit neighborhood. Walt loves his longtime home, which he has meticulously maintained, and hates the thought of ever leaving it.

And certainly not his next-door neighbors, a Hmong family relocated to Detroit from Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. Walt really hates ethnics, of all kinds, and particularly Asians. It has something to do with his wartime experiences in Korea.

Such a toughie. But you somehow suspect, because Eastwood overplays him so broadly, almost as if he’s winking at us, that deep down he just might turn out to be a big old softy. Sure enough.

When the cheeky, thoroughly Americanized teenaged daughter of the Hmong family, Sue (Hmong actress Ahney Her), is unfazed by his gruffness and gently joshes him about being such a sour fuddy-duddy, you begin to see a thaw. And when her younger, good-hearted but aimless brother Thao (Bee Vang, also a Hmong American) bungles his attempted theft of Walt’s prize possession, a mint-condition 1972 Ford Gran Torino, as part of a gang initiation, the young woman ropes Walt into serving as the wayward kid’s reluctant mentor and role model.

It all becomes a little too pat and a shade too precious when Walt is taken under the wing of the Hmong family. They ply him with tasty native dishes to show their gratitude to him for running off the thugs trying to recruit Thao into their gang. (That’s where an M-1 and the line “Get off my lawn!” come in). And, when he offers dating advice to the shy Thao, the picture goes all saccharine on us. And as he warms up his prejudice cools down.

Eastwood directs with his customary spare style, drawing effective performances from his cast of unknowns while clearly reveling in his every snarl, slur and glare.

In the late going, as “Gran Torino” becomes more mushy and the curmudgeon loses his edge, you get a sense that Eastwood is trying a little too hard to curry favor with the audience.

At the age of 78 he wants to reassure us that The Glare is just an act, folks, and behind that laser look is a really nice guy. Which is no doubt true. But “Gran Torino” suffers for the effort to ingratiate.

Soren Andersen: 253-597-8660

* * * (three stars out of five)

GRAN TORINO

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Eastwood, Bee Vang, Ahney Her, Christopher Carley

Running Time: 1:56

Rating: R; language, violence

Where: In wide release