How to die in the drug trade in just a few easy steps—and don’t call that a spoiler. Every pivotal character in this modern noir is doomed. You can tell right away. If they don’t meet a violent end within this film’s 117 minutes, they’re gonna get it eventually afterward.
The plot is simple. It seems complex only because most of the characters are constantly talking their heads off in wizened, writerly language about sex, greed, morality and mortality. Cormac McCarthy writes, Ridley Scott directs. They’re two old men with large bodies of work behind them and they’re in full-on art film mode here. They take it slow. The dialogue isn’t natural, but that’s often the way of noir. It’s not a mirror image of life, but a strange impression of it. Fatalistic speeches and oddball character moments count for more than plot.
It’s about an El Paso lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who gets in on a lucrative drug deal with south-of-the-border thugs. His plans are to simply invest money, let the smugglers do what they must out on the sunbaked highway, make some quick millions and then move on to marry his angelic girlfriend (Penelope Cruz). He’s shady, but he’s not a sadist. He’s thoughtless, but he’s not heartless. We don’t like him much, nor do we hate him. McCarthy and Scott paint him in such spare details that they don’t even give him a name (he’s just “The Counselor”). They dress him up in shallow virtues and sins while they deliberately keep him charmless. In the end, he’s a lowly plankton swimming unprotected among the big sharks of the brutal Mexican cartels and some other closely lurking predators. When the whole plan goes bad, the teeth of the beast come down.
This is nobody’s masterpiece, but it is memorably eccentric. It deals little in suspense (the film’s major double-cross is no surprise) and it’s not even sexy (Cameron Diaz’s showcase scene where she humps a car windshield is more strange than anything else). What it brings is a slow-dissolving bleakness. It’s a pessimism that all but burns up the screen.
Critics hated it and audiences ignored it. This stands a good chance though at being a future cult film for deep-digging admirers of McCarthy and Scott, as well for film noir fiends always looking for another ace of spades.