Ridley Scott is of course a celebrated Hollywood director, even if he is actually British, especially notable to me for such films as Alien, Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down. Unfortunately his recent output is of more questionable merit. Like many people, I was enthusiastic when Prometheus was first announced, but ultimately didn’t bother to watch it because its reviews were so uniformly bad.
Still, I was willing to give The Counselor a chance. Not only was it directed by Scott, its screenplay was written by Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novels No Country for Old Men and The Road. I never read them but I did like the films based on them. Plus who can ignore a cast consisting of Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and Penélope Cruz. With such a surfeit of talent on board, it can’t be all bad, right? As it turns out, it can.
Things go wrong in The Counselor right from the start. It opens with a painfully awkward sex scene involving Fassbender and Cruz. It’s hard to keep the faith that Scott is still capable of making a decent flick when you hear a line like “You have the most luscious pussy in all of Christendom.” The scene is meant to convey the sexually charged passion between their two characters but it is so ineptly shot that instead of seeing the characters, you are distracted by the thought of how bad a director needs to be to produce such garbage.
It isn’t an outlier either. In another scene Fassbender and Bardem spend ten minutes on an inane “I want to eat your pussy” joke. The most famous of these is of course the car-fucking scene, which, now that I’ve read an analysis of it on Broken Forum, does have something of a point behind it, but is badly enacted by Diaz, who is incapable of mustering the required predatory sexiness. Things might be different if Angelina Jolie had played this key role, as was originally planned.
When the characters aren’t talking about sex, they talk philosophy instead or at least they pretend to. Maybe they count as deep thoughts in Scott’s head or maybe it would work better better in a novel, but in this film it’s just rambling bullshittery. It isn’t clever, it’s isn’t funny and it isn’t intelligent, no matter how many words you use to convey the simplest of messages.
To be fair, underlying drug deal gone bad plot is rather interesting, when Scott feels like spending screen-time on it, and of course the film looks expensively produced and visually interesting. I liked Bardem’s virtuoso performance. Everyone else was okay except for Diaz who is clearly out of her depth. But none of this can change the fact that this is a terrible film. Indeed, reviews for this are abysmal, with Salon in particular, calling this one of the worst films ever made.
I don’t claim to know that much about cinema so my judgement is amateurish at best, but I feel that while Scott remains as technically proficient as ever, he has lost touch with what makes a film good. He seems incapable of judging the effectiveness of scenes given that they just don’t achieve what he apparently thinks they are supposed to do. It’s a wonder why all of the top rate Hollywood talent went along with this nonsense instead of putting this project out of its misery.