The Counselor

October 25, 2013

Jays Rating:
Actors: / / /
Director:


I’m giving it a D ratingIn his first original screenplay, writer Cormack McCarthy teams up with director Ridley Scott to create the very unique crime-drama-thriller, The Counselor. The story begins with a romantic interlude between an attorney in El Paso known only as the Counselor (Michael Fassdender) and his girlfriend Laura (Penelope Cruz) primarily to show that he has everything. (Okay, he has a beautiful girlfriend.) In the next scene, we see a nightclub owner named Reiner (Javier Bardem) and his girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz) out in the desert watching his Cheetahs hunt. When the Counselor wants to buy a diamond but doesn’t have money because of financial trouble, he teams up with Reiner to make a bunch of money trafficking drugs for the Mexican drug cartel. After talking to a middleman named Westray (Brad Pitt) the Counselor oversees 20 million dollars worth of cocaine traveling from Columbia to Chicago in septic trucks. Soon the Counselor’s greed has horrible consequences for everyone involved. I’ll just cut to the chase here by saying the violence is brutal and extreme, and the sex scenes are actually kind of funny and over the top. I am primarily talking about a piano wire strung across a road with an approaching motorcycle and a sex scene with a car’s windshield. (I was in-between moaning with disgust and giggling like a 12-year-old boy in Sex Ed class.) I went to my screening with great expectations but left the theater thinking, “What was that?” The film begins slowly with different scenes seemingly thrown in for no apparent reason and both major and minor characters appearing and disappearing without explanation. The acting was great so the problem has to be in the script. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country For Old Men” was fantastic, but it’s totally different to write a screenplay. I’m still trying to figure out what the movie is trying to say: Life is cruel, or Don’t be greedy, or It will bite you in the end? I’m giving this raunchy and violent film a C- rating.

This movie has been given an R rating by the MPAA