My review of The Counselor

First of all a little disclaimer, this isn't the worst film of the year or the worst film ever which according to Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir it is.  I usually respect this critic and in fairness he makes a lot of valid points in his critique but the tone of the review is so acidic and vitriolic that I'm wondering if he was having a really really bad day when he set foot inside the theater. It could have been a great film but it certainly falls short of necessary expectations.
The Counselor has high pedigree written all over it.  It was written by famed author Cormac McCarthy who also wrote The Road and No Country for Old Men, both were turned into successful movie adaptations, the key word here being adaptations.  This is McCarthy's first foray writing a screenplay solo and it's quite a different endeavor than writing a book.  Before we get to the meat of the story and why it's not all that tasty,the film features an A-list cast headlined by Michael Fassbender in the titular role, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz,Penelope Cruz and Brad Pitt, pretty heavy hitters all.  Fassbender who I usually love in everything and on whose shoulders this film mostly rests appears bemused and perplexed throughout most of the film except for a bit of a heartfelt crying jag at the end.  I understood and shared his confusion, he was probably thinking what the heck am I doing in this picture and thank God I have Twelve Years as a Slave to redeem myself, ditto for Brad Pitt, greasy haired pony tailed and cryptic, he's also in Twelve Years and can at least look forward to some favorable publicity on that one.
The film opens with a view of tangled white sheets and a voice over from the Counselor.  The bodies are hidden under the sheets but are soon revealed to be those of Fassbender and Cruz.  The talk is supposedly dirty but McCarthy being in his early eighties might no longer have a very clear idea of what dirty talk should sound like.  When Cruz is asked what she would like the Counselor to do to her, her tentative reply is: "I want you to touch me down there."  Ok down there where, my toes my knees etc... plenty of options plus it just sounds ludicrous and silly.  There's another attempt at sex talk over the phone and it falls equally flat. Even though Fassbender can usually make reading the phone book sound sexy, it doesn't work this time because he's such a cipher, a character in search of development, a character so unworthy of being noticed that, in fact, he doesn't even deserve a first or a last name.  The whole affectation of being called Counselor
 throughout the whole movie gives the character less not more weight.  We basically have no idea who this guy is, we only see him in lawyer mode once while the rest of the time he's listening to people telling him what a bad idea this drug deal is (they're right) in pseudo-philosophical verbiage which is meant to be meaningful but merely ends up sounding pretentious and uninteresting.  I love intellectual discourse in a film as much as the next gal (the French are very good at this) but this is just verbal diarrhea.  For instance do I need a dissertation on the merits of such and such a diamond when all the Counselor wants to do is buy a friggin stone but had to jet set all the way to Amsterdam to get it....really and he still needs the drug deal.  The drug deal itself is a mess of such gigantic proportions I won't even try to make sense of it because it doesn't.  The players are all bad stereotypes of stereotypes.
Javier Bardem in a very very bad hairstyle with very very bad glasses and very very bad taste in women, namely one man eater named Malkina (I kid you not) played by Cameron Diaz, is one of those players. Besides his fondness for Malkina and two cheetahs which he lets run loose in the desert like some bad ad for a perfume or maybe a car he too has a fondness for expounding at will.  He does utter the best line in the movie though while Malkina is busy fucking his car with her Brazilian waxed vagina pressed against the windchill he declares it "too gynelogical" to be enjoyable.  Thankfully we can only see her gyrating from the back a scene bound to be imitated countless times on You Tube.
The deal goes bad, the hammer falls as we knew it would, the unintended victim being the Penelope Cruz character the only moderately true character in the film but one we hardly get to see. Malkina is somewhat interesting, she is played ferociously by Cameron Diaz but in the end we know too little about her to feel anything but revulsion for her viciousness and lack of compassion. Apparently she's the pin on which everything turns and it really doesn't matter since the whole story is so incomprehensible.
The Counselor ends extremely abruptly and leaves the viewer with a sense of is this it, apparently it is. The central problem probably lies with the screenplay. McCarthy is known as a difficult writer but the ample room to expound in a book form is not available in screenplay format with the end result being a screenplay which feels slight,pedantic and unfocused.  Good acting and a competent director are not enough to rescue a deeply flawed script in precious need of a rewrite.