What do you get when you pair master filmmaker Ridley Scott with No Country For Old Men author Cormac McCarthy? The answer is "hype," of course, and in the days leading up to the release of their 2013 collaboration, The Counselor, movie fans eagerly awaited what they hoped would be some kind of bonafide masterpiece. Unfortunately, The Counselor - which stars Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Penelope Cruz (what a cast!) - emerged as a whole lot less than a masterpiece. In fact, it didn't even come marginally close. It's fair to say that The Counselor is, above all, an incredibly strange movie, which isn't exactly surprising given that it was written by a incredibly idiosyncratic writer, but there's also a sense that McCarthy doesn't really know his way around the screenplay format. The whole movie feels disjointed and unconnected, and though the performances are good, you can't escape the feeling - by the time the credits are rolling - that the whole movie was pretty darn pointless. Maybe time will better to this one than the recent critical reviews, but as it stands: huge disappointment.
