The Counselor

The Players- Legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott (Alien) and Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men).
 
Their Mission- To recreate what it would feel like to be stuck in a room with a bunch of philosophy students while Breaking Bad was playing in the background.
 
Their Weapon of Choice- Being nice, polite and well-dressed.

 
THE COUNSELOR is simple story once you look it up on IMDB. A nameless lawyer (Fassbender), madly in love with his fiancée Laura (Cruz), is seeking to provide for her and give her the life she deserves. He decides to get in a once-and-I'm-out deal: namely, to get involved in a venture dealing with twenty million dollars worth of drugs being ferried to the States from Mexico.

Much like Ridley Scott’s other mess of a movie, Prometheus, the script clearly needed be broken down and rebuilt from the ground up in order to function. It felt like putting two very different sensibilities, those of its author, Cormac McCarthy, and its director, Ridley Scott, together and hoping for magic. Instead you discover not even bacon can make broccoli delicious, unless the pig ate the broccoli beforehand.
 
What you get is a whole movie where you just watch a group of decent, polite well-dressed people trying to function like Shakespearean gangsta. As a viewer you feel distanced from the movie because you don't have a clue what is happening or why. I could complain of ponderous dialogue, but the movie didn't really have dialogue. It just felt like people making boring statements. The only interesting moment in the movie is where Cameron Diaz has sex with a car. This was not the awesome kind of interesting, but more the “What the hell did I just watch?”.
 
Never have I wanted to turn my phone on so much in a cinema. Angry Birds has a more engaging story. The vanilla plot ticks over mechanically towards a destination that was never in doubt, while the so called dialogue strives to be profound. You’ll spend more time wondering where these character got there outlandish outfits. The Counselor is just a terrible movie unless you like the idea of seeing good actors do Shakespeare if it was performed by William Shatner.


1 out of 5 well-dressed waffles.