Movie Review: The Counselor

Quite simply put, I was in shock after watching The Counselor. Not shocked because it was a great film but shocked that a Pulitzer-Prize winning author managed to write a film with such an amateurish screenplay.

Cormac McCarthy, author of acclaimed novels such as No Country for Old Men, The Road and Blood Meridian, wastes a wildly talented cast and director in his first original screenplay. If I didn't know better, I would've thought this was McCarthy's first time writing anything. The script has pretty much no focus or point at all. Over the course of nearly two hours, only a handful of relevant events to the story occur and even when they do, they are kind of vague and left me feeling kind of lost.

McCarthy essentially outsmarts himself by overcomplicating things. McCarthy focuses solely on implementing symbolism and crafting flashy dialogue , while throwing character development and the presence of a gratifying (and present) storyline to the wayside. No amount of symbolism or sharp dialogue can substitute for an actual plot and The Counselor spends its entire duration proving that point. Due to this lack of plot, what we're left with is the title character (Michael Fassbender) having a series of conversations with Mexican drug lord Reiner (Javier Bardem) and his associate (Brad Pitt) about getting into the drug transportation business. They warn him against it, but of course he doesn't listen and the deal ends up going wrong when the drugs get stolen at the U.S. border by a rival cartel. Once the deal goes wrong, the conversations turn to how the parties involved are going to get out unscathed. These events somehow chew up almost two hours and left me saying "that's it?" when the credits rolled. These characters are so empty and one-dimensional, that you could not care less when bad things start happening to them. On top of that, the setup for the bad events is so prolonged and uneventful that when shit starts to hit the fan, you've already clocked out on the film.

To counteract the lack of things going on, McCarthy tries to keep the audience awake by inserting filler scenes that are so absurd you have to pay attention. One scene in particular documents Reiner's psychotic girlfriend (Cameron Diaz) randomly having sex with his car (Trust me watching Diaz straddling the hood of a Ferrari is not even remotely sexy, it was just flat-out bizarre.) While he succeeded in keeping me awake by doing this, it only made the messy writing of this film even worse. These scenes detracted even further from what little semblance of a plot that is present and are a very cheap attempt to generate some kind of shock value from the viewer.

The only positive thing I can say about The Counselor is that it could've been worse if it wasn't for the cast. Javier Bardem puts 110% into his performance as the eccentric Reiner and Cameron Diaz does her most inspired work in years as Reiner's sociopath girlfriend. It's a valiant effort from the main cast, but at the end of the day it still can't save this film from falling flat on its face. McCarthy singlehandedly sinks The Counselor with a dud of script that takes a film that could've been one of the year's best and instead makes it one of the most forgettable.

2/5 Stars