The Counselor (2013)

Yes .. I'm late again with last week's entry (as pretty much everything else which is delayed in my life), hoping that I'll manage to find something better than what I've watched last Friday. No time ... So: "The Counselor", probably Ridley Scott's worst movie ...

I've seen bad reviews when it was released, so I skipped it. Good call. In the end, since Ridley Scott is (still ...) #1 in my top directors, I said myself: ok, let's check it out ... The subject: a counselor with pretty shady relations decides, pressed by finance problems, to get involved deeper in a drug trafficking network. The result comes swift & merciless, one of the transports is lost, and some (more or less) coincidences seem to blame the "counselor" & his associates. And ... that's it. Well,... we see what everybody gets. I didn't say everything, to keep some stuff also for the movie, which anyway is a disaster ...

To be fair, the blame is split. The directing is not that bad after all. The script is, however, awful. When I've said years ago, opposed to all critics, that "No Country for Old Men" is a pile of overrated philosophical crap I knew what I was saying, and I still keep my opinion. Cormac McCarthy is doing here a sort of "No Country for Greedy Unlucky Men" in a chaotic and senseless manner. From the idea of buying a diamond ring when apparently the wind blows through your pockets, to the extremely short interval between getting involved in the business and the "your life is over" phase, coming as something that wants to be a sort of divine punishment for the tagline "sin is a choice" ... Emphasizing senselessly on elements lost without any explanation, from (again) the diamond ring turned and analyzed in the first 15 minutes on each side, but totally absent after, to clients of the counselor looking for quarrel whom you don't know, but it doesn't matter because they disappear as fast as they appeared ... Philosophical discourses by almost all the characters from a club owner,a drug lord, a diamond seller (yup ... that ring ...) to a poor Mexican bartender who talks like he finished Harvard but couldn't find another job ... No other comments.

I managed to heroically watch the movie to the end despite all the above. The last minutes, however, erased my last bit of appreciation. Spoiler alert (don't give a damn, you should know this): Up to watching this movie, I guess the most horrible murder I've seen on a mainstream title (= we exclude ridiculous scenes from horrors like "Saw", or other niche productions), was killing Joe Pesci in "Casino". It's horrible because 1. the scene develops extremely rough but being realistic in the same time and 2. to make everything more hard to swallow, if I recall correctly the character is based on a real one = assuming with a similar fate. In "The Counselor" case, the "real" element is 100% fabricated = based on a certain device invented apparently by the brilliant screenwriter, which by using a small engine without a stop button, tightens a metallic necklace on the neck until the head snaps and is severed from the body (I wouldn't be surprised that some demented person will try in practice "the bolito" which according to Google is "patented" by this movie). The test subject is Brad Pitt in an atrocious scene taking place on the London sidewalk. I'm not sure that this was really needed in the script .. but I am sure that I am lacking a certain rating on my blog (until now) ...

Rating: 1 out of 5 (maybe a bit subjective for the last part above ... but on IMDb I gave the same .. and there the rankings go up to 10)

I'm lazy to search a trailer for something like this ... check youtube if you really want it ...