The Counselor

Directed by Ridley Scott

(R)

**

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“The Counselor must have looked great on paper,” but the results are “unforgivably phony, talky, and dull,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. Blessed with an all-star cast and working from a screenplay by novelist Cormac McCarthy, director Ridley Scott has created “a nasty piece of borderland noir” that wants to be bracingly dark but ends up feeling “hackneyed and pathetic.” But Scott shouldn’t shoulder the blame for this “extremely unpleasant” tale about a drug deal gone bad, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. “Everyone here”—-including stars Michael Fassbender, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt—is prisoner to McCarthy, the film’s “clumsy puppet master.” The characters have no discernible human traits, and the words they’re given “sound stilted and theatrical.” To me, the eccentricity of McCarthy’s script plays well against Scott’s “lucid visual style,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. “The story may be elusive, but there’s a clarity, solidity, and stillness” to his images of the Texas and Mexico desert “that augment the narrative’s gravity.”