The Counselor
Nobody ever really talks about <PERSON> acting in this movie, probably because there isn't much to talk about. Where <PERSON>, <PERSON> and <PERSON> are all at minimum vivid–the beneficiaries of very careful styling and costume design—<PERSON> is vague, blurry, and out of focus even within the pitiless digital clarity of <PERSON> cinematography. He's playing a cipher so empty he doesn't even have a first name, much less the kind of inner life that would make his final recognition of his transgressions—and their tragic, lethal consequences—register on an emotional level. 295
But then for this cold stainless-steel bolito of a movie to work, at least in the way its supporters claim, the Counselor's ultimate despondency has to be more bleakly funny than anything else—the cartel-thriller equivalent of "fuck around and find out." Sadly <PERSON>, for all his talents, is not the guy you go to for a precisely managed satirical tone, which is why, for all the compelling, heartfelt claims that this is some kind of stealth comic masterpiece, it's really only fitfully outrageous and entertaining, and otherwise dully beguiled by its own pretentiousness— the antipode of No Country For Old Men, which is so perfectly controlled it skirts (and of course transcends) monotony en route to feeling actually profound. I'm also not sure <PERSON>'s the guy you go to for world-weary cynicism about the inevitability of the profit motive, as he's such an unrepentant mercenary, and he's no better (or more thoughtful) than his spiritual inheritor <PERSON> when it comes to aestheticizing Mexico as a jaundiced abbatoir or lazily implicating the US of A in cycles of suffering. Throw another one on the pile (literally) the movie snickers, effectively emblematizing its own po-faced, disposable sadism. 698