Review by Lucia Santiago Dantes
It’s certainly not the first first movie about cross border drug trafficking and for sure it will not be the last one. In fact there are too many around these days. Ridley Scott give us his own version of this new outlaw order in his most recent film “The Counselor”
With a great ensemble cast: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender and Bruno Ganz (you’ll probably remember from Win Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”), the story evolves around a lawyer only known in the film as The Counselor (Fassbender, yes the Prometheus’ android) a lawyer living a luxury life. He has everything, even a beautiful girlfriend called Laura (Penélope Cruz). As he does his job, he also pays a visit to Reiner (Bardem) a man who seems to have as many layers as his girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz). Reiner invites The Counselor to join the group and he accepts. As the deal begin to turn wary, he looks for advice and research into Westray (Brad Pitt). Soon he finds out the real consequences of his bad decision when the shipment is stolen and everybody has to pay for it.
As much as I liked the film, it has its own troubles. Too many rhetoric characters and not much character development is a tragic combination. At this point we are all well acquainted with the perils of organized crime on both sides of the border for just focusing on some gruesome details and greediness all explored in a very superficial way. The script was written by Cormac McCarthy the same author of the novel “No country for old men” as both were written by Cormac McCarthy. (although the script for No country… was written and directed by the Cohen brothers). Needless to say, I’ll stay with No Country for old men or should we say the other bad hairdo Javier Bardem movie?
El Kiosko Magazine 