The Counsellor: bleakness abounds in the latest all-star Cormac McCarthy adaptation

Despite its A list credentials, this film struggles to emerge from the shadow of Breaking Bad and No Country For Old Men

Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott's The Counsellor opens pure and white, with two innocent lovers – Michael Fassbender and Penélope Cruz – entangled in blinding ivory bedsheets murmuring sweet nothings to one another, and it ends, as it so often does with McCarthy, in a sanguinary harvest of fountaining scarlet.

Fassbender's naive Texan lawyer thinks he can turn an investment of a few grand into a share of a $20m drug-smuggling pay-off. Known throughout only as "Counsellor", he sure is terrible at taking advice, the very thing he's paid to dish out. All his cohorts and associates in the drug game warn him that he cannot get away clean and he doesn't listen to any of them, but corpse by corpse, he certainly finds out. His more relaxed partner Reiner is played by Javier Bardem, who was the glowering embodiment of pure raw evil, Anton Chigurh, in No Country For Old Men, the Coens' sterling and occasionally similar foray into McCarthy's dread moral universe. Here, the Chigurh role belongs to his girlfriend Malkina, played by Cameron Diaz with a gold tooth, silver nails and a cheetah-spot back tattoo. She has two real pet cheetahs and at one point claims that "to see quarry killed with elegance is beautiful to me". She's the purest predator in McCarthy's violently Darwinian criminal realm, where cartel bosses order mass beheadings and violent public executions not because it's personal, but, in one druglord's phrase, because it's "a means of keeping up appearances".

The Counsellor is immediately, stupendously out of his depth. The load is stolen on Malkina's orders and its transit across the United States leaves a trail of corpses. The target of everyone's greed is literally buried in shit – four large barrels of cocaine hidden in a full sewage tanker – and almost everyone who touches it dies badly.

So far, so Blood Meridian, salted with the Sunbelt landscape and pharmacological iconography perhaps now over-familiar to us from both No Country and Breaking Bad, neither of which this can really compete with. McCarthy's first-spec screenplay doesn't give much leeway to actors, larded as it is with wordy disquisitions – not all of them artfully integrated – on morality and death and bloodshed. The European actors have the better of it in this regard: Bardem and Fassbender just say the words clearly and let them breathe, grandiose as they often are. Diaz, in contrast, is all at sea, declaiming her lines like a Mean Girl from the Valley playing Lady MacBeth-by-numbers. She looks the part, in Mob-wife Armani and Russian-hooker eye-shadow, but she sounds like nails on a blackboard.

That being said, all power to Ridley Scott for refusing to temper or blunt the astonishing, almost nihilistic bleakness of McCarthy's worldview. If you're sick of Hollywood endings then this might be just the movie for you.

Contributor

John Patterson

The GuardianTramp

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