The Counselor (2013)

The Counselor (R)

"What would the BAR Association say?"

The first script from the pen of author Cormack McCarthy (author of the novel No Country For Old Men) is a head scratching affair.  Directed by the venerable yet wildly uneven Ridley Scott (Bladerunner), there is the expected energy and pop to the filmed scenes.  A-list actors lead by Michael Fasbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz (miscast as a Jamaican femme fatale) culminate in one the years best casts, and yet the words fall flat.  The snappy Noir prose style is leaden, the situations preposterous, the outcome dreary.  The story?  Fasbender plays a successful Texas lawyer, whose shady client base draw him into the south of the border drug smuggling business to maximize his profits.  The house of cards is shaken by the backstabbing, golddigging Diaz, a character so over-sexualized, so misplaced, so supposedly evils-of-woman-incarnate/female-of-the-species-is-more-deadly that she could only come from the pen of a mid-life-crisis fever dream.  Some scenes work, some shock to righteous effect, most collapse under the heavy weight of pretension.  A freak show of many unique sights and sounds, but you may regret the two-bits to get in.

4.5 New Definition of Car Sex out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)