Review of The Counselor (2013) by Orthostice — 15 Nov 2013

If you listen carefully you can almost here the snapping and cracking of the backs of a million Carmac McCarthy and Ridley Scott fans who are bending over backwards to try to rationalize and justify the mess that is the Counselor.

I fall into the camp of people that found this to movie to be a monstrosity. The script is indescribably terrible the dialogue is stilted, wordy, pompous, unnatural, shallow, unrealistic and pointless, and it manages to explain too much and explain too little, miraculously, all at the same time. Perhaps with better direction and editing the plot (which is actually fairly simple) would have made a bit more sense but at times you will likely still struggle to follow what's happening because the scenes are put together so poorly and the script introduces new characters at random. This is a movie that gives off the impression, at first glance, of being intelligent. You'll get to hear speeches that draw on the many worlds intepretation of choice and the potential lack thereof, meaningfulness, etc. from unlikely sources. Having majored in philosophy I found them superficial and insulting. If I didn't have a background in philosophy, I would merely have found them preechy and pointless, I'm guessing. The writing was stylistic but yet tried to be conversational and just failed in every way conceivable.

There are a couple decent action sequences and a cool murder scene at the end but the characters are lifeless or caricatures of interesting characters because the writing is laughably abysmal. This movie is a complete and utter failure, and I have a great attention span, have liked movies with little to no plot and was not expecting a suspense filled thriller. This was just a complete turd. I'm guessing what happened is that no one had the courage to tell McCarthy that his script was terrible or someone thought it was deep (even though it isn't) and greenlighted this movie. What a mistake.