10 Smart Movies Which Are Secretly Dumb
7. The Counselor
Even though Ridley Scott's crime thriller The Counselor received mixed-to-negative reviews upon release, there nevertheless remains an air of prestige and intellect attached to the project due to the fact that the script was written by legendary author Cormac McCarthy.
Yet if you cut past the film's verbose, philosophical dialogue, this is a really a hilariously trashy movie that just so happens to be wearing a nice suit.
This is a film where - spoilers - Cameron Diaz shags a car and a certain A-lister gets decapitated with a ream of motorised razor wire.
Perhaps had Scott more enthusiastically embraced the dumb, The Counselor would've been warmly welcomed by viewers as a well-made slice of campy schlock, rather than the painfully self-important, dreary drama that it so clearly wants to be seen as.
As much as nobody wants to badmouth the brilliant McCarthy, this film shows the extreme difficulty in adapting his thorny written dialogue to the screen without it sounding like a laughable parody of itself.
Stop trying to understand The Counselor as an intellectual exercise and you just might appreciate it for the messy, dumb lug of a movie that it actually is.