“Violence and mayhem ensue after a hunter stumbles upon some dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash near the Rio Grande”
No Country for Old Men is the latest Oscar winning smash hit movie by Joel & Ethan Coen. It is based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. The film starts off when our protagonist, Llewelyn Moss played by Josh Brolin stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong. After little consideration, he decides to take the money, thinking to know well what risk he is taking. Brolin does an excellent job at creating a simple but resourceful and most of all, genuinely likable character. The only likable character in the film, for that matter. More on that later.
From this point on, the film unfolds like a straightforward, but extremely well orchestrated all-out chase story, so suspenseful that I would call it reminiscent of the original Terminator. This comparison to the ultimate stalker movie is no thanks to the unimaginative killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who is sent after Brolin to recover the money.
Though dark, pneumatic nail gun wielding and relentless, Chigurh is equiped with little personality to speak and a set of uninteresting one dimensional morals. At one point the character is described as lacking a sense of humor. Such a clear sign must have been obvious to the brothers Coen when they adapted the novel to a script, but apparently it must have sounded like a good idea at the time. If this were another movie, I would have written this mistake down to someone deciding it would be “cool” or “badass” to have a cold blooded killer who doesn’t exhibit complex emotions, but ‘No Country’ feels far too artsyficial for this to be true. It’s more likely that the character in some metaphoric way is supposed to portray a deeper meaning which frankly eludes me.
What earns this movie a comparison to ‘Terminator’ is the absolutely masterfully crafted air of tension that runs throughout the entire film - from a technical point of view, the directors get everything right. Thanks to great timing, editing, and wonderful camerawork, the deserted plains and seedy motel rooms of Texas breathe an air of suspense, and every sequence of the film is heavy with the storm that you can just feel is coming as the film builds up to a final confrontation between the hunted, Moss, and his hunter, Chigurh….
-spoiler alert-
This brings me to my main complaint about the movie. As I’ve mentioned before, the main character Llewelyn Moss is pretty much, the only character in this film who’s worth a damn. At what feels like halfway into the film, this character is killed off. What’s worse, he is killed off screen by some crew of Mexican gangbangers.
With the main and only character of interest gone, the film proceeds to drag on for another half hour as the remaining side characters talk a lot. It would be like having Sarah Connor die in the first bar fight, followed by an hour of James Cameron zooming the camera up Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ass.
The movie ends with Tommie Lee Jones sitting at his kitchen table, rambling on about the good old days when criminals were more than just bad people or something, and proceeds to whine about a mystical dream that he had about his late father. It’s quite ironic that I’ve only even thought of Jones’ character as I’m reaching the conclusion of this review. Ironic, but not surprising. Jones plays a sheriff who doesn’t do a damn thing throughout the film other than stare into the distance, quite melancholicly, and complain about how he’s getting too old for this shit. That’s not why I go to movie theatres.
If by now, you are thinking that this review seems poorly structured and convoluted, then I have done a good job at capturing the essence of this film.
I’m sure that fans of the book will tell me that I’m missing some grand old point here, and that supposedly, Jones’ character represents the heart and soul of the story. I say to them that film is a visual medium, and films require something worth looking at. It’s not a book. Films simply don’t work that way. Certainly not this one.
After this tremendous letdown I was compelled to leave the theater and drink lots and lots of beer.
(1 votes) 
