The Counselor (2013)
Average Rating: 4.9/10
Reviews Counted: 129
Fresh: 44 | Rotten: 85
The Counselor raises expectations with its talented cast and creative crew -- then subverts them with a wordy and clumsy suspense thriller that's mercilessly short on suspense or thrills.
Average Rating: 4.8/10
Critic Reviews: 35
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 28
The Counselor raises expectations with its talented cast and creative crew -- then subverts them with a wordy and clumsy suspense thriller that's mercilessly short on suspense or thrills.
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Average Rating: 2.5/5
User Ratings: 23,014
Movie Info
Legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott and Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) have joined forces in the motion picture thriller THE COUNSELOR, starring Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt. McCarthy, making his screenwriting debut and Scott interweave the author's characteristic wit and dark humor with a nightmarish scenario, in which a respected lawyer's one-time dalliance with an illegal business deal spirals out of
Cast
-
Michael Fassbender
Counselor -
Brad Pitt
Westray -
Javier Bardem
Reiner -
Cameron Diaz
Malkina -
Penelope Cruz
Laura -
Dean Norris
Buyer -
Natalie Dormer
Blonde -
Goran Visnjic
Banker -
César Aguirre
Truck Driver #1 -
Daniel Holguin
Truck Driver #2 -
Christopher Obi
Malkina's Bodyguard -
Bruno Ganz
Diamond Dealer -
Paris Jefferson
Waitress -
Dar Dash
Barman -
Richard Cabral
Young Biker -
Rosie Perez
Ruth -
Alex Hafner
Highway Patrolman -
Andrea Deck
Watching Girl -
Sam Spruell
Wireman -
Toby Kebbell
Tony -
Emma Rigby
Tony's Girlfriend -
Edgar Ramirez
Priest -
Eben Young
Bike Clerk -
Richard Brake
Second Man -
Barbara Durkin
Cafe Waitress -
Giannina Facio
Women With Mobile Ph... -
Velibor Topic
Sedan Man -
Jose Juan Rodriguez
Junkyard Man -
Alexander Biggie
Junkyard Boy #1 -
Pablo Paredes
Junkyard Boy #2 -
Cavassa Ventura
Third Man Killer -
Frank Spano
Man With Bar -
Alejandro Marzal
Man With Pistol -
Gerard Monaco
Hotel Waiter -
Fernando Cayo
Abogado -
Carlos Julio Molina
Workman -
Ruben Blades
Jefe -
Donna Air
Chauffeur -
Marco Tulio Luna Ram...
Cafe Man -
Lida Cardona
Mourning Lady -
Roger Dalmases
Delivery Boy -
Julien Vialon
Maitre'd
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All Critics (129) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (44) | Rotten (85)
The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth.
It's not so much a bad film as it is a disappointing one. A very disappointing one.
It's like a mumblecore movie about a bunch of Sarah Lawrence philosophy majors, made by coked-up rich people for 100 bajillion dollars.
Movies can be like undercover cops: They become too enamored of the worlds they explore.
The action is all but blatantly telegraphed, even as McCarthy keeps shuttling his characters around from Amsterdam to Mexico.
The Counselor [is] a droning meditation on capitalism in the form of a thriller about cocaine trading on the Tex-Mex border.
As a screenwriter, the 80-year-old [McCarthy] turns out to be a great novelist.
Nothing Makes Sense
... an excellent reminder of why even our best novelists should be discouraged from writing for the screen ... a ludicrous, laughably over-the-top attempt to one-up 'No Country for Old Men.'
Stimulating and seductively dark--a smart, challenging neo-noir.
Even if the film failed to win me over, this all-star thriller is not a total misfire, if only it were firing more than just impressive looking blanks.
Like David Fincher's Se7en, one of this movie's closest spiritual cousins, The Counselor ultimately delivers a diagnosis that tells the awful truth.
Disappointing.
Unfortunately, the first screenplay by Cormac McCarthy tries to spice up a torrid fish-out-of-water crime thriller with cryptic existential literary language (read: pretentious) that is better read than spoken.
What went wrong? I am sad to say, the script by Cormac McCarthy. It just doesn't work. And who can even follow this thing? It starts out under the sheets and quite frankly should have stayed there.
At its best, this film is reminiscent of the philosophical slant often taken by the Coen brothers. At its worst, it recalls the excesses of latter-day Oliver Stone.
No complaints about the acting or Ridley Scott's directing and cinematography. They are superb. Cormac McCarthy's writing is not so impressive.
Fails to generate a feeling that we are seeing something that means much.
Bleak and formidable, this brutal, depressing, cautionary tale may be an actor's dream but it's an audience's nightmare: a muddled mess of a movie.
a bore and a chore
The Counselor is a novelist-turned-screenwriter experiment likely to be met with mixed reception between the 'get it' and 'don't get it' types in the audience.
Novelists don't always make good screenwriters-this is the first film for which McCarthy has written the screenplay himself-and The Counselor's nihilism soon becomes tedious.
Indulgent, but slick and endlessly quotable.
Audience Reviews for The Counselor
Super Reviewer
The monologues and advice to the Counselor are overly complex at times, giving the sense that McCarthy wrote this as he would one of his books, where you have the benefit of re-reading and digesting passages slowly. The scene with Bardem recounting the "car incident" is one of the funniest moments on film this year!
Super Reviewer
Read the rest of my review at: http://www.examiner.com/review/the-counselor-i-m-not-a-contrarian-but
Follow me on Twitter @moviesmarkus
Super Reviewer
The titular Counselor (Michael Fassbender) seems to have a nice life. He's just proposed to his girlfriend, Laura (Penelope Cruz), and their sex life is vigorous. Then an old client, Reiner (Javier Bardem), invites the Counselor in on a shady drug transportation deal. The allure of easy money is too much for the Counselor to resist. Naturally, things do not go according to plan. A Mexican cartel intercepts the transport truck, bodies pile up, and the stakes get very personal for the Counselor.
To be blunt, if Cormac McCarthy had submitted this script under a different name, it never would have made its way to the big screen. This is the award-winning author's first screenplay and it shows. The pacing is shockingly slack, with the film rarely having any sense of life onscreen. I'm not a slave to the standard three-act structure of Hollywood screenwriting, but you need to produce something that keeps pushing the film forward, heading to a finale that seemed inevitable. McCarthy's script is bogged down with pointless scene after pointless scene, little arias that get away from him, indulging his characters to monologue at length about philosophical nonsense. There are lengthy conversations about diamond shapes, the very nature of existence, and all sorts of Matrix Reloaded-like lingual excesses. These characters talk round and round; it feels like there aren't even other characters in the room. Their lengthy, pretentious conversations also do little to push the narrative along or reveal essential bits of character. You get to hear one crime kingpin talk about his favorite poet. Great, but what can you say about him beyond the fact that he's well read? Every character in this movie, from top to bottom, is a vapid space. Some of them have interesting aspects/quirks, like owning cheetahs or masturbating on car windshields, but not one character can be described as interesting. Beyond the terms "ruthless," "pragmatic," and "naïve," I cannot even fathom a way to describe anyone in this film. They don't even really work as plot devices because that would imply causality. When you couple the void of characterization with ponderous, rambling dialogue, then you're already sabotaging your entertainment chances.
The plotting is muddled beyond all comprehension. I like to consider myself a pretty sharp moviegoer, but I was left scratching my head far too often. With a paucity of characterization and some idle pacing, I was confused as to what exactly was going on, sometimes even just at a literal level. What was this plan? How do all the players fit in? Why are the betrayers acting as they do? Who works for whom? Why should I be shocked about revealing the identity of a betrayer when it was made all too obvious in a previous scene (note: this is so directly transparent that it cannot count as foreshadowing)? Why does the appearance of a DVD signify finality after a previous phone conversation already did the same thing? And most of all why should I care? Watching this movie is like traveling through a long, impenetrable fog. There are serious, ongoing clarity issues, which make those florid digressions and overall pointless character nattering to be even more maddening. There are well known actors that come in just for single scenes, and then those scenes amount to little to nothing on the overall bearing of the plot. The Counselor doesn't feel like a fully formed story; it feels like a collection of 30 scenes served as disposable sides for actors during preliminary auditions.
Even worse, for a film about drug deals gone badly, murder, and Cameron Diaz masturbating on a windshield, The Counselor is deathly boring. I grew restless before the halfway mark and just kept hoping beyond all evidence that the film was going to find some direction and pick up the intrigue. It did not. The film's essential story structure, criminals getting in over their head and paying a price, is a familiar one. This structure can work to marvelous results both grand (Goodfellas) and small (Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead). Hell, even McCarthy's own novel lead to the brilliant, Best Picture winner No Country For Old Men. Look at how the Coen brothers approach the macho, nihilistic material as opposed to its author. They created a sense of all-consuming dread with efficiency, elegance, and their characteristic macabre sense of humor. Watching The Counselor, it's like the turgid knockoff of a McCarthy novel. When I got home I felt like I had to watch a Quentin Tarantino movie to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. Tarantino is given to long indulgences of elaborate dialogue as well, but he makes his characters interesting, with personalities that grab you and stand out, and listening to his dialogue is a pleasure unto itself.
McCarthy's brand of ruthless killing has its peculiar intrigue, but again it only functions as morbidly fascinating little asides. The use of tripwire is given high priority by the killers onscreen, decapitating a speeding motorcyclist and cutting into the jugular with another character. It's a strange, harrowing, and gruesome manner of death, but is it at all practical? I know I'm treading dangerous waters bringing the concept of reality to a murky film, but what killer decides to set up a wire approximately neck high across a road? It seems likely that another car would travel that same road in the hours of buildup. It also seems highly lucky to adjust the wire to the exact height to cut into the neck. I'm no professional killer but it seems like a lot of setup and guesswork. I have to imagine there are far easier ways to kill a speeding cyclist or a man walking along the street. Attention professional hitmen of the movies: stop making your job more difficult than it has to be. Nobody is awarding you a ribbon for Most Inventive Kill.
There are plenty of pretty faces in this movie, genuine acting talent, and to strand them with precious little characterization is an outrage. Fassbender (12 Years a Slave) is a little too sly to play naïve, and his later actions lack a necessary sense of desperation to sell his emotional plummet. Cruz (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is so effortlessly sensual but is put on the sidelines early and stuck in the damsel-in-distress box. Brad Pitt (World War Z) is the slick snake charmer we've seen plenty of times before. But the worst lot goes to Diaz (Bad Teacher). She's supposed to be mysterious and threatening as Reiner's sexually adventurous girlfriend but Diaz plays things so stone-faced serious. This poor woman is given the most unerotic, bizarre sex scene in modern history to enact, and I don't know whether to applaud or pity her. Sure she gets to uncork some meaty monologues about Malkina's trenchant world perspective, but this is the movie that will be defined by Diaz humping a windshield. At least the movie plays this out somewhat realistically, with Reiner more horrified than aroused. What did that outrageous scene add up to? Also, Penelope Cruz plays a "Laura" and Cameron Diaz a "Malkina"?
I know it's a petty thing but it really irritated me how often people refer to Fassbender's character as "Counselor." The end credits do reveal this to be his name. If you thought it got irksome hearing Leonardo DiCaprio say "ole sport" after every other sentence in The Great Gatsby, then enjoy the repetitive declaration of Fassbender's lone job title. "What do you think, Counselor? I don't know, Counselor. I'd think things over, Counselor." Do people really refer to somebody by this title as their name, and so frequently? He also doesn't seem to be a competent lawyer at all.
The Counselor is such an unforgivably boring slog, languid and rudderless when it should be thrilling and complex. The characters are nonexistent, the plotting is muddled and confusing, the dialogue often laborious and roundabout, and the overall film is too meandering to properly engage an audience. Even talented people can produce bad movies, and here is further proof. With this cast, with this crew, there is no excuse for The Counselor to be overwhelmingly stilted and tedious. I cannot fathom what attracted the talent to this film beyond the cache of working on "Cormac McCarthy's first screenplay." If the results of The Counselor are any indication, I don't know if we'll be seeing too many McCarthy screenplays in the future, or at least McCarthy scripts that haven't been vetted by other writers who better understand the contours of the medium. His florid arias and abstract, directionless plotting can be forgiven on the page, but no on the screen. Scott doesn't help matters, taking great care to film the luxury of the lifestyles on screen. What we're left with is a tepid movie about bad people meeting bad ends, with little entry for an audience to care or even find entertainment. The art direction is given more care than the characters. In the weeks leading up to its release, The Counselor adopted a tagline from a quote by Laura: "Have you been bad?" It was turned into the Twitter hashtag promoting the film. Well, Counselor, you've been very bad.
Nate's Grade: C-
Super Reviewer
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Latest News on The Counselor
October 24, 2013:
Critics Consensus: The Counselor is Eccentric but UnevenThis week at the movies, we've got an amoral attorney (The Counselor, starring Michael Fassbender...
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