After a critical mauling and poor box office returns in the US, The Counsellor has had a fairly low key release here despite an impressive looking cast and a big name director. However, the prospect of a potentially twisting and gripping tale of cross and double cross during a major drug deal and the presence of Ridley Scott in the director’s chair meant I was still eager to see this movie.
Dedicated to his late brother and fellow director, Tony, Ridley Scott does no more than a workmanlike job, but with the source material he is working with, that is a decent effort. He cannot rescue a mostly ponderous and pretentious script by Cormac McCarthy. All the basics of a thrilling plot are in place, and whilst I am happy that some of the plot strands are unresolved, in trying to write a screenplay that is more complex than a standard thriller, McCarthy has produced something that lacks coherence.
Characters appear and are dispatched without any real explanation of who they are. Worse than that, just as the film should be gaining momentum in the last half hour, it gets totally bogged down in a series of long and dull conversations between characters. One of those appears for the only time in that verbose scene, and I was no wiser about who he was at the end of it!
The normally excellent Michael Fassbender heads a starry cast. He does the best he can in the role of the main protagonist, but he does struggle with portraying an unsympathetic character and is lumbered with some of the worst dialogue in the film. Javier Bardem has some fun with his part as Fassbender’s business partner and Brad Pitt breezes effortlessly through the film in a small role.
The female leads fare less well. Cameron Diaz is unconvincing as Bardem’s conniving girlfriend, and features in one of the most excruciating scenes this year, in a flashback to her making love to Bardem’s car. Penelope Cruz has very little to do in a role that had potential to be the moral centre of the film.
A frustrating film then, with the makers clearly thinking it is cleverer than it actually is. They seem to be content to leave characters partially developed and the plot under-cooked, whilst at other times being too heavy handed, such as when showing the fate of Cruz’s character. Sometimes, I ought to take more notice of other critics!