Saw the perplexing new movie The Counselor… the new Ridley Scott crime flick written by Cormack McCarthey and starring Michael Fassbender, Javiar Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Camerson Diaz, and Brad Pitt (with Rosie Perez, Dean Norris, Ruben Blades, Natalie Dormer, John Leguizamo and who knows who else).

This is a pretty bad movie… but not because the actors don’t give it their best… but because the movie is just … random… weird. Disjointed and meandering.

It’s more-or-less about drug smuggling across the border and maybe kinda sorta why you don’t want to get into that if you aren’t aware that the other people in that scene have no moral boundaries. Scenes sometimes just kind of happen, other scenes happen and a character says “Why are you telling me this?” and I’m wondering that too. It’s a very very dialogue heavy film with a lot of somber, theoretically insightful philosophical talk that seems to go in circles and then dead-end when the scene decides to be over. There’s three or four plots, most of which rarely ever interact and some could be cut or kept or not…

The movie doesn’t spend time explaining what’s going on, who’s who, and what their basic plans are for quite some time… In other words, it’s unfocused… and maybe I’m just not smart enough to get the underlying elements here. I mean, I saw No Country for Old Men and basically got the themes and enjoyed the movie (it was also written by Cormack McCarthey) but this one just had me scratching my head.

And then the movie just kind of decides to end… after killing people off without any actual pay off to whatever their plot was. And one character doesn’t seem to have any kind of pay off (though he gets to ugly-cry a lot for his Oscar Clip). And then there’s a body in a can which was no doubt saying something Deep and Meaningful but… yeah… what?

Score: 65