After all of these years hearing about The Counsellor, about how awful and bonkers it is, I finally got around to watching it. It is certainly bonkers, but it's also consistently entertaining throughout, simply giving viewers a great combination of a director and cast having fun with material that always seems poised to go in a dozen different directions at any one time.
Written by Cormac McCarthy, best known for writing the novels that both No Country For Old Men and The Road were based on, this is the tale of a counsellor (obviously) who decides to get involved with a potentially-lucrative drug deal. Things don't go according to plan, however, and the counsellor soon finds out that some actions can never be undone. He had been warned by people around him, but he assumed that there weren't any risks. How wrong he was.
Directed by Ridley Scott, this is a wild ride that clocks in with a runtime just shy of two hours. It doesn't need to be that long, a 90-minute movie would probably have worked just as well, but there's nothing here that isn't either intriguing or visceral and brilliant. I wanted to rewatch this as soon as the end credits started rolling. Although sometimes messy, it's always ready to show you something nasty in the most cinematic way possible, whether that is by keeping certain elements offscreen to make everything more palatable or by showing you some imagery that feels like it hasn't been depicted in movies before.
It also helps that the cast are very game in their performances, with Cameron Diaz seeming to have the most fun she's had in a long time, playing a character who is always a number of steps ahead of the other main characters around her. She's also involved in the weirdest and wildest scene in the film, as Javier Bardem's character watches her "make love" to his car windscreen, and I have to give kudos to her for committing to a script with that moment in it. Bardem is hilarious in that moment, as well as being fairly amusing in many of his other scenes. Fassbender plays the titular counsellor, excellent at being all cool and confidence until things start to unravel, and Penélope Cruz is perfectly fine in the rather thankless role of his unwitting partner, Laura. Brad Pitt has a decent little role, someone who is also involved in the drug deal, but who seems much more aware of the high stakes, and there are excellent moments for Rosie Perez, Sam Spruell, Richard Brake, and some other familiar faces.
I can't quite explain why I loved this so much though. The script isn't great, not in terms of the actual dialogue anyway, and the randomness detracts from what should have been a coiled spring of a dark thriller, but it all worked. Maybe my low expectations helps (I try to keep things balanced, but it's difficult when a film has a solid reputation already, good or bad), or maybe the majority of people just didn't recognise this for the slice of brilliance that it is. Yeah, it must be that. There's no other possible explanation. I'm not sure I would recommend this to others, but I hope some people give it a chance, and maybe they'll unexpectedly love it as much as me.
8/10
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