Review of The Counselor (2013) by Rtfy — 20 Oct 2015

The Counsellor is not perfect, but the virtues in my view outweigh the flaws, one of the latter being the one too many lyrical speeches on what amounts to the ethics and exercise of choice. It's not the substance of the speeches that palls but their smugness and their length. The musings of one too many cameo characters on the consequences of a choice to seek profit in crime are become much more gratuitous than the highly effective, vividly explicit, and not powerfully concise scenes of violence.

The problem addressed in the script by Cormac McCarthy seemed to be roughly this: What kind of a world do we live where the kind of clinical violence routinely practiced by the drug cartels is possible? It's a theme McCarthy addressed in No Country For Old Men, but in The Counsellor from the point of view of much less sympathetic main character, not a small town sheriff at the end of a long career of peacekeeping, but a sleek urbane lawyer with extravagant tastes.

Like No Country For Old Men, The Counselor shocks and repels on first viewing. But the film stays with you, and you find yourself several months later wanting to see it again. And then you'll know you're going to be watching this film repeatedly, until you can exhaust it's force, the compelling questions it asks, the characters it not so much develops as strikingly draws, and the savage actualities it tries to address.