The Counselor (2013)
Directed by Ridley Scott
A lawyer finds himself in far over his head when he attempts to get involved in drug trafficking.
4 connections found
View:
4 films that influenced The Counselor
What critics say influenced The Counselor
There are numerous echoes of No Country For Old Men , including Bardem in a silly haircut, but also a crucial difference between the two: That earlier work, so masterfully (and faithfully) brought to the screen by the Coen Brothers, conveyed McCarthy’s pessimistic worldview almost exclusively through the architecture of its story, particularly its devastating anticlimax.
In fact, the last time this combination came together, the result was No Country for Old Men, itself an Awards Season juggernaut.
If you recall Tommy Lee Jones’ closing monologue in No Country for Old Men, you’ll recognize the formal, oddly literary speech.
Then it hit me: McCarthy, of course, wrote “No Country for Old Men,” which, if you’re not drawn into its themes, ends rather abruptly.
He reminds me, early in the film, of Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins in the movie of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, if Holly cynically teamed up with Orson Welles’s Harry Lime in profiteering via diluted drugs.
They’re all fairly basic talking heads plus behind the scenes footage, but the cast makes a valiant attempt to explain their characters, and you may be interested to hear how Scott compares The Counselor to Thelma & Louise, Matchstick Men and A Good Year.
The somewhat-sophisticated Sir Ridley Scott favors larger-scale epics (think Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven), and hasn’t worked with something as compact as The Counselor since 2006’s A Good Year, … where he also tried to bolster a thin premise with eye-catching, frivolous distractions.
He has directed one lumbering, shallow spectacle after another (Kingdom Heaven, American Gangster, Body of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus) with only the gently sweet and, I think, vastly underrated A Good Year worth the time.
At its worst, it recalls the excesses of latter-day Oliver Stone, with a whiff of the awful Savages hovering around its edges.
Its high-profile cast clearly has no idea what to make of the material, the end result making Oliver Stone’s underwhelming cartel film, “Savages,” seem like an all-time great.
Like Oliver Stone's Savages, this tony crime thriller exploits the brutality of the Central American drug trade for shock value but transpires mainly in the cool, moneyed world of the callous rich.
"The Counselor" is nothing but a dumb, gory, grab-bag of clichés and the biggest waste of talent since "Savages."