The Counselor
- By Anthony Sherratt
- 13 years ago
What it’s about?
Filmmaker Ridley Scott and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) team up for this thriller about a respected lawyer’s (Michael Fassbender) one-time involvement in an illegal drug-trafficking deal that spirals out of control.
What did we think?
Hilary says: The cast alone – Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt – is undoubtedly a crowd puller and the vivid characters they play (especially Malkina by Diaz) is definitely a highlight of this film, but this is McCarthy’s first-time screenplay and it shows. The Counselor’s slick, good looks can’t make up for the fact the story is tediously indulgent and incomprehensible for the majority of its two-hour running time. But it does contains some of the best monologues in recent memory, and you won’t want to miss Diaz’s auto-erotic sex scene and the recounting of it by Bardem.
The Indian girls, with hair like flowing black manes, and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in sunshine, a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the west, as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and the coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as big as half the world.

