But The Counselor certainly isn't big-budget (it cost just $30 million) and it's a brutally dark film that was never going to catch on with major moviegoing population. I've got no idea how Scott convinced 20th Century Fox to pony up the funds for this movie, but I've gotta give him props for somehow wrangling up the dollars for this project. Unfortunately, the film is a bamboozling affair that's kind of fascinating in it's ineptness. Like, Ridley Scott (who directs) and Cormac McCarthy (who wrote this motion picture) believe in this project with all their heart and soul, and that kind of devotion would be endearing if it didn't result in a movie that left me cold.
It appears that McCarthy wanted to reprise some of the themes of his novel No Country For Old Men, which was adapted into a 2007 movie that's among my favorite movies. Specifically, the relentless presence of evil and it's effects on the common man are brought to the forefront of The Counselor. But whereas No Country had characters like Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) whose personalities and characterization flowed naturally from the plot, the characters in The Counselor are underdeveloped entities, particularly the title character played Michael Fassbender, whose so lacking in a concrete personality that the story has him run into a bitter ex-client of his who spells out the various character flaws of the Counselor.
The romantic interest of the Counselor, played by Penelope Cruz, gets even less depth within the confines of the plot, which seems to be a recurring theme for the various personas that clash within the crime riddled landscape of The Counselor. Since these two are so poorly developed, watching the despair that transpires to them just doesn't become as dramatically compelling as the films hopes it'll be..Now, unlike the two aforementioned characters however, the other members of the main cast are stylized to an insane degree visually, perhaps as a way to compensate for their underdeveloped nature. The other three primary characters in the movie can be summed up as follows: Brad Pitt is a cocky cowboy, Cameron Diaz has a sexual fetish for watching cheetahs hunt their prey (complete with cheetah tattoos) and Javier Bardem has been soaked in hair gel.
It's kind of insane, and sometimes it's fun to watch it all unfold before your own eyes. Like I said, this wasn't some indie movie funded by dozens of agencies; this was a major movie released by 20th Century Fox into over 3000 theaters with some pretty huge A-list talent at its disposal. And yet, all this bizarre material has managed to make it to the final cut of the movie, though sadly, all this unorthodox content doesn't result in a particularly thought-provoking experience. Ridley Scott, a quite capable visual filmmaker, at least keeps the movie looking nice, but man, wouldn't it be nice if there was actually something engaging to go with those pretty colors and environments? Alas, The Counselor exists on a canvas of existence where there is no beginning, no end, only sorrow, despair and Cameron Diaz humping a windshield.
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