How has this happened? “The Counsellor,” an adult crime thriller directed by Ridley Scott and penned by Cormac McCarthy, is not only not one of the best films of the year, it’s one of the worst. I’m stunned, I’m perplexed and I’m very confused. This cannot be: a film from the director of “Alien” and “Blade Runner” and the author of “No Country for Old Men” is one of the worst films of 2013. Once again I must ask, how has this happened?
I’ll tell you how: “The Counsellor” is the first screenplay written by McCarthy, a brilliant author who, as it turns out, isn’t very good at writing screenplays. In “The Counsellor,” his characters like to talk, and they like to talk a lot. Often when they talk, they are reciting lengthy, existential monologues in which they philosophise about greed, death and, bizarrely, the hunting habits of the jaguar, which seem to last for an eternity. The characters in this film don’t talk to each other: they spout riddles at each other. It’s all very pompous and it all feels like a McCarthy adaptation gone horribly awry — or, more damningly, Tarantino at his self-indulgent worst. I have no doubt McCarthy’s script read well on paper. On screen, it’s an endurance test.
The film has a very good cast — actually, a great cast. In the starring roles are such hot Hollywood items as Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt. A fantastic ensemble, I’m sure you’ll agree. Trouble is, they’re wasted on characters who are for the most part insipid and unlikeable, and we are given precious little insight into their lives or their motivations. They barely register as living, breathing human beings — rather, they’re walking, talking riddle machines.
The film is set in the dark and dangerous world of cross-border drug trafficking. Fassbender plays a man known only as The Counsellor, to whom we are introduced as he burrows his face between Cruz’s legs (classy, Fassy!). The Counsellor wishes to take part in a drug deal, a one-time operation to earn him some money for an unmentioned reason, though early on we see him eyeing a precious diamond. He approaches Pitt’s swaggering cowboy middleman Westray, who warns him that the consequences of failure will be fatal, and brutally so. The Counsellor’s loving, naive fiancée, played by Cruz, is oblivious to the deal.
As is always the case in movies like this, the deal goes bad (though it's not The Counsellor's fault — it's just a horrible coincidence), and some nasty drug cartels come looking for The Counsellor and his fiancée — and they, unlike every other character in the film, aren’t looking to talk. I apologise if I’m making all this sound more exciting than it really is; really, it’s quite boring, plodding lifelessly from scene to scene with little pace, even less coherence and a lot of pretension. Oh, and talking. Lots of talking.
There are two major players in this story who add a few sprinkles of flavour to a dry mix. They are the spicily charismatic drug kingpin Reiner and his conniving girlfriend Malkina, and they are played by Bardem and Diaz. Diaz just oozes raw sex in a performance that's diabolically wicked, while Bardem, clad in a face-melting butterfly-patterned shirt, is as flamboyantly outlandish as his electrified haircut. Together, they take part in a scene that, just a couple of weeks after the film's US release, has already become notorious — it is a scene in which Diaz slips off her panties, mounts the hood of a Ferrari, does the splits and proceeds to dry-hump the windshield. Once again, I must apologise for making this sound more exciting than it really is (though this scene is the most enjoyable in the film, if only for Bardem’s inspired remark that Diaz’s pancaked nether regions resemble “one of those bottom-feeders you see going up the side of an aquarium... sucking its way up the glass”).
I’ll commend “The Counsellor” for being a properly adult thriller that’s bold, daring and different. I will not, however, commend it for being a load of twaddle. After 100 minutes of failing to entertain, grip or thrill (the Ferrari fucking aside), the film comes to a depressingly bleak and nihilistically unpleasant finish which finally plunged me into misery. Perhaps that was the point, though I’m not entirely certain and frankly, by this point in the film, I’d stopped caring. Maybe McCarthy could have spun a great novel out of this story; he certainly hasn’t spun a great movie out of it.
Rating: 4/10
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