Review of The Counselor (2013) by Josh_Manning — 09 Nov 2013

I have no idea what happened here, or really what I watched. I kept waiting for the character interactions to make any sense whatsoever. They never did. The places that hurt the worst were Diaz and Bardem, and for opposite reasons.

Watching Diaz try to deliver that last pseudo monologue in the restaurant was awful. I was on a date and had to work to keep from laughing because I thought it would come across as arrogant. She's just not capable of delivering complex, philosophic dialog in a believable way. Afterward, and I think in the moment too, I kept comparing that scene with the last scene from No Country for Old Men and Tommy Lee Jones' monologue. I think maybe Ridley Scott thought we'd be too busy fixated on a very sexy Diaz to notice the difference in quality.

She played the animal really well. Did we have to have her hump a car though? I mean she lives with leopards and has her own leopard spots. We get it. She's the only thing that can survive in the drug trade--an animal.

But I think what hurt the most was wasting Javier Bardem on an idiot character who 1) consistently and genuinely claims to not know anything of substance while obviously knowing enough to live in the lap of luxury, and 2) spouts McCarthy's (in this film frequently turgid) lines with his trademark talent...which here contrasts so badly with everything else we observe about his character that we reject both the character and the lines as absurd caricatures of McCarthy's writing.