More Pointless Violence and Stupidity: A Movie

**Spoiler Alert: The Counselor is a huge piece of shit!!**

Cormac McCarthy can be as good as they get and as bad as they come. His Border Trilogy books are among my favorites but No Country for Old Men was a not-very-interesting portrayal of one man’s brief intersection with the world of drug outlaws. The Counselor was less a movie than a forum for McCarthy to give a few speeches about life and greed and good and bad and snuff flicks and how expensive good pussy (his word) is these days. Forget about the fact that the story doesn’t hold water even momentarily. Worse still is the fact that if you see the trailer there isn’t a single surprise in the entire film. A rich douche gets involved with drug dealers, the deal goes to shit, a guy gets his head cut off with a piece of wire stretched across the road. Moral of the story: protect your neck at all cost? Say no to drugs? Money isn’t everything? Always look on the bright side of life?

First of all, he gets involved with the Juarez cartel as an investor? Huh? What, are they some struggling internet start-up in need of venture capital? The last things those murderous goons need is cash; they have fucking warehouses full of it. This just shows how little thought went into McCarthy’s script. “I’ll make him get involved with really bad drug dealers and sit back and watch when the shit hits the fan.” Think a little more, dude. Secondly, he stretched a piece of wire across the road and not one other car or truck came along the road before the soon-to-be-headless motorcyclist? That scene had nothing in it because they spoiled it in the trailer. It wasn’t even that cool of an idea to begin with.

Next, if things did go wrong wouldn’t the first thing the Juarez thugs would do would be to get him and find out where the product was? They are completely amoral scum but they are mostly in it for the money, not to simply punish people who screw up. And if the cartel scum even got the slightest whiff that the Cameron Diaz character ripped them off then she and all of her close associates would be at least as dead as the Brad Pitt character.

And didn't he have to front the money? If so then why would the cartel give a shit if someone ripped him off? At that point they were his drugs to do with what he wanted. How could he have been out $20 million? This made zero sense.

I suppose that McCarthy really liked Death of a Salesman and was paying homage to Willy Loman or maybe Gil Gunderson from The Simpsons. I liked some of the dialogue but the plot was just way too damn silly and stupid.

And lastly, if someone handed me a snuff film starring my wife I would throw it back in their face and demand they give me the movie on a USB drive or at least give me the download link. What am I supposed to do with a DVD? Get into my Delorean and go back to 1993 so I can watch it in my disc player right after I watch The Love Boat?