There is nothing sadder then watching two people you admire fail. The first to disappoint is Ridley Scott, director of Alien, Blade Runner and The Martian. The second is Cormac McCarthy the writer of some of the best books of the 20th and 21st century, considered one of the the greatest American writers living as well as the mind behind No Country For Old Men and The Road. One of Cormack’s best and most acclaimed books is Blood Meridian. He and Ridley have been attempting to create a big screen adaptation of the maddening acid western (one character takes a pee in a active volcano) but despite the years of work nothing has come of it. Instead we have this, a film that suggests that despite his reputation in the world of literature McCarthy should stay far away from screenwriting.
The film follows Michael Fassbender as the titular Counselor (no name is ever given) as a lawyer working for the cartel. He is excited about life. He has a beautiful home, a stunning girlfriend (Penelope Cruise) and is in the midst of organising to run a lucrative club with a drug dealer played by Javier Bardem. The counsellor meets with Brad Pitt who warns him of the danger he is getting into with the counsellor about to work on his first drug deal. After a series of convoluted and confusing events that result in the drug deal going horrible wrong. Namely with the Counsellor being framed for stealing the drug money for himself.
This sounds like an enticing plot but tragically this movie fails horrible in execution. I don’t require a film to be none stop action or to have heroes prevail against villains or for really anything pleasant to occur for me to enjoy a movie. The problem with the movie is two fold. It has a plot that is extremely difficult to follow and when thinking about makes very little sense. Namely because they spend so little time on the plot and instead stick to reciting poetry. The majority of the film is one off monologues that go on for long portions of time, even taking up entire scenes. Each is beautifully written but leave me feeling empty as although they are great they refuse to tie into the movie at all and come off more as pieces from McCarthy’s books which he never used and has stuck into this film.
The directing is nice and the actors all do fine jobs with the material. That is with the exception of Cameron Diaz as Bardem’s girlfriend who whilst everyone else has chosen to play their characters as people with emotion she appears to just be playing “sexy” and nothing else. Even with the rest of the performances being fine and the monologues being interesting they cant escape the insanely predictable nature of the story. A charter mentions a bizarre murder weapon and monologues about it which results in a characters death by that weapon, the counselor talks about an awful event that happened to a friend of his which then happens to someone close to him etc. This can work in a book as you read it over a long period of time and thus might not pick up on some of the painfully obvious foreshadowing but on film they might as well hold up signs saying when in the film the characters die.
The movie is a very smart man that has written some lovely scenes but he tragically has no plot to put them in
1/5
