Arts & Entertainment

How's 'The Counselor'? Online Reviews and Show Times

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By Rebecca McCarthy, Patch

Cormac McCarthy, author of "The Road" and "Blood Meridian," has written the screen play for director Ridley Scott's latest work, "The Counselor." So you can expect pronouncements and weighty words. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. And, because it's a Ridley Scott movie, you can expect beautiful images and lots of violence. The movie is about a lawyer, the nameless Counselor (Michael Fassbender) who decides to get involved with a criminal he's been defending for years (Javier Bardem) and move some drugs. Things don't go as the Counselor expects, but do go as we expect, since we know the drug cartels do much mischief and violence in Mexico. The cast is great, and includes  Penélope Cruz, Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz, but the script is, well, too much McCarthy and too little dialogue.

Here's what the critics are saying: 

All of this, playing out against a backdrop of ever-shifting locations (the film is set mostly along the Texas-Mexico border but, intriguingly, was shot entirely in England and Spain), should have made for riveting viewing, particularly with the reliable Ridley Scott directing and Cormac McCarthy writing the original screenplay. But “The Counselor,” disappointingly, plays like a long series of striking yet enigmatic scenes, without enough story to hold them together. Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times 

The film looks spectacular, even as it basically swipes its color palette from No Country, and Scott stages the violence—a doomed getaway attempt, brutal highway fatalities—with his usual icy technical proficiency. No amount of needless chatter can quite dilute the power of The Counselor’s grim endgame, especially given the way its writer and director conspire to keep the threat offscreen, like some terrible, unseen force of nature. A.A. Dowd, AV Club

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. Because it was scripted by Cormac McCarthy, the characters dispense studiously grim and cynical dialogue, and because it was directed by Ridley Scott, their inner lives matter less than their jewels, designer clothing, and fashionably spare living spaces. J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

The portentous, emotionally vacant film The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott, plays like a parody of a Cormac McCarthy adaptation. Every gloomy and bloody outcome, most taking place along the border between the U.S. and Mexico and all having to do with a drug deal gone bad, is foretold. Every speech marks the cruel power of greed and condemns not just the weakness but the very smallness of mankind. It’s derivative nonsense. The baffling thing is, McCarthy did write The Counselor. Mary Pols, Time Entertainment

This being a Ridley Scott film, the images are always fabulous to behold (Dariusz Wolski, who shot Prometheus and is now doingExodus with the director, was the luxuriant cinematographer), but here they are employed mainly to show off the lifestyle -- locations, vehicles, clothes, jewelry, makeup, haircuts; it's a like two-hour commercial for a no-limit credit card. The nominal lead is no more knowable than his name and there's little Fassbender can add to the character other than to become progressively more sweaty and desperate in the manner of so many old film noir heroes stuck in a spider's web. Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter


"The Counselor" runs 1 hour and 51 minutes and is rated R.


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