So if you've ever read Cormac McCarthy, you'd understand why his writing style is potentially problematic if applied directly to screen, and why the film adaptations of his work are often pretty heavily modified. His writing is sparse and muscular, preferring to show rather than explain, and while that's something that can be extremely effective in film, in my experience film characters often need more fleshing out than their book counterparts. A character in a book can be sufficiently fleshed out by just living inside of their head, but the same technique when applied to film can make the whole enterprise feel empty. Hollow, even. So how does this translate to screen?
In "The Counselor", Michael Fassbender plays the titular character, a high-priced lawyer of some sort who finds himself mixed up with the wrong crowd. Various other "wrong crowd" characters abound. Consequences ensue.
The Good: there are some solid and tense scenes, and the film looks beautiful. Additionally, it doesn't shirk from the brutal violence that defines the drug trade, especially for the Mexican cartels. Beautiful people wearing beautiful things in beautiful places is always pretty to look at, at least. To a certain extent, I appreciate not having my hand held through the plot. It doesn't necessarily bother me that the details are sparse - the details are sparse in, say, Pulp Fiction, right? Fassbender, at least, does what he can with the material, and maybe I just have a soft spot for him, but in a world so lacking in details and exposition, all he can do is react to things that we aren't really in the loop on.
The Bad: the rest of the accomplished and surely expensive cast isn't given much to do but lounge around on couches in expensive clothes and lecture our erstwhile protagonist (who assumes that role just by virtue of his existing) with 200-level philosophy meanderings on the nature of fate, good and evil, snuff films, etc. Great actors like Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt are paraded around like clowns in preposterous outfits and give one long soliloquy after another to a guy who I'm not sure we're particularly supposed to like or care about. It's like McCarthy got REALLY pissed at how everyone praised Tarantino and decided he'd do one better. However, where Tarantino's films carry themselves with exuberant panache, McCarthy's first attempt feels at once bloated and empty, both stale and needlessly nihilistic.Neither his attempts to humor or disturb land with the effectiveness of literally dozens of cheaper and less star-studded films that I've seen. Ultimately, the plot doesn't feel sparse for narrative reasons, it feels sparse out of laziness. For every legitimately "cool" scene there are three that are boring at best, and fail at portentous with a particularly vile brand of postmodern pretension more often than not. This is a film that references far better media and geopolitical occurrences out of hand, choosing instead to focus on college stoner-level diatribes on topics from the profane to the "profound".
So if you've been wondering if combining a great writer with a great director and a better cast = great film... your question has been answered, and that answer is an enthusiastic "NO". There are elements of a strong film here, but ultimately it feels cheap, whitewashed, needlessly flashy, and far inferior to other modern noir flicks. The unique combination of feeling simultaneously hollow and ridiculously bloated is something that's generally reserved for huge action flicks, but Scott and McCarthy seem to have brought that "After Earth" feeling to a whole new genre. So check it out if you feel like seeing some cool deaths and have already watched every single kind of good movie that you can get your hands on. Otherwise, I think you can skip this one.
4/10.
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