Synopsis
Sin Is A Choice.
A lawyer finds himself in far over his head when he attempts to get involved in drug trafficking.
2013 Directed by Ridley Scott
A lawyer finds himself in far over his head when he attempts to get involved in drug trafficking.
Michael Fassbender Penélope Cruz Cameron Diaz Javier Bardem Brad Pitt Bruno Ganz Rosie Perez Sam Spruell Toby Kebbell Edgar Ramírez Rubén Blades Natalie Dormer Goran Visnjic Cesar Aguirre Daniel Holguín Chris Obi Richard Cabral Provence Maydew Paris Jefferson Dar Dash Alex Hafner Andrea Deck Emma Catherine Rigby Eben Young Richard Brake Barbara Durkin Giannina Facio Velibor Topic Juan José Rodríguez Show All…
Peter Burgis Derek Trigg Sue Harding Simon Hayes Jason Swanscott Glen Gathard Peter Hanson Chris Burdon Doug Cooper Luke Brown
Tina Earnshaw Waldo Mason Aisling Nairn Chris Lyons Polly Earnshaw Sangeet Prabhaker Nathaniel De'Lineadeus Jane Oginsky Yuraima Morcillo
Scott Free Productions TSG Entertainment Ingenious Media Fox 2000 Pictures Nick Wechsler Productions Chockstone Pictures Big Screen Productions KanZaman Productions
玩命法则, 黑权大状, 法律顾问, The Counsellor, El Consejero, Le conseiller, 카운슬러, Cartel, El consejero, Advokāts, Советник, O Conselheiro, 黑金杀机, Danışman, Ο Συνήγορος, Konzultant, The Counselor - Il Procuratore, Съветникът, Adwokat, A Jogász, Радник, היועץ, 悪の法則, Avocatul, O Conselheiro do Crime, Саветник, 黑權大狀, El abogado del crimen, 玩命法則, მრჩეველი, Patarėjas, เดอะ เคาน์เซเลอร์ ยุติธรรม อำมหิต, El conseller
75/100
Recipe for a movie that'll piss people off: Jacobean + Euclidean + Hegelian. Can't really fault anyone for hating this (Andrew O'Hehir just tweeted "The Counselor isn't merely terrible. It may be the worst movie ever made"), but its pitiless anti-narrative played for me like a pure, uncut version of No Country, one without the hand-wringing old men. Was only bothered by the philosophizing at first, when I (naturally) assumed it would be occasional and intrusive; once it completely took over the movie, with the entire supporting cast turning unapologetically logorrheic, rolling with it wasn't hard.
"But what's the point?!" Just a portrait of hubris, really. This'll sound kinda bizarre, but The Counselor is essentially the same story as…
"We will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives."
"When you cease to exist, the world that you have created will also cease to exist."
I've never fully bought into McCarthy's mercilessly cruel & fatalistic worldview, but something about the aggressively masculine, contradictory and primal existentialism he wanders here, as unsubtle as it is, is deeply fascinating to me. And accompanied by some of Ridley Scott's most vivid, richly detailed mise-en-scène & a lush sense of style that can explode with grotesquerie when required, capturing the way money is used as a bad paint job on a world that more closely resembles a garbage dump filled with corpses. It's like an evil little cousin to No Country for Old Men,…
SOME SPOILERS - YOU WON'T CARE
That isn't regulation screen wash, Cameron.
Under normal circumstances, any person that happens to have made Alien and Blade Runner in their career in film direction has very little excuse for making a film like The Counselor. But Ridley Scott has now made so few films in the last 25 years that have even managed to slightly interest me that he actually has plenty of excuse. He's just not very good at all any more.
The Counselor is a terrible film. An amateurish, lazy, completely unfocused, mind-numbingly boring and monstrously stupid film that had me shifting uncomfortably from its opening scene. At least you can say that it started as it meant to go…
"And the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining." So much to love about a movie that sends the audience out with a thought like this. Eight years old and it feels centuries away from what Hollywood has become.
"You think you can live in the world and not otherwise be a part of it?" or "Grief is worthless."
The push-pull between Ridley's glam and McCarthy's austerity frequently achieves the kind of manic, ostentatious, occasionally hallucinatory grace Scorsese went looking for (and didn't really find) in THE DEPARTED. And holy hell, such glorious video. Very much what you'd have had if Tony Scott had had his brother's aspirations to good taste, so much so that I think this was, in one way or another, certainly made in tribute.
A glorified mess of artificiality, The Counselor is a cerebral Tarantino-esque morality tale. No quickfire snazzy dialogue, but rapid philosophical treaties about fate, destiny and everything in between.
The Counselor juxtaposes medium and intent astoundingly well by creating what is obviously a straightforward crime yarn and ripping from it everything that would encompass that genre, infusing it with distancing artificiality spiraling towards grim reality, all the while highlighting the inevitability of life and ending with pitch black clarity as to what it is about. You don't fuck fate, fate fucks you.
With in your face foreshadowing, dead pan satirization of the banality of life (death, love, sex, take your pick) and disjointing yet rich and deep language, it is not…
It may not be as good a movie as No Country for Old Men, but it does strike me as a better adaptation of Cormac McCarthy. In fact, McCarthy's screenplay (and Ridley Scott's unexpectedly vibrant, at once overcooked and understated treatment of it) possibly lays out his strengths as an author more visibly than even his greatest novels. You can see here how his approach of constant digressions and a dialogue style that is deep on philosophy and abstract observation but short on exposition, nonetheless uses its various open-ended distractions as the mechanism for which he propels what eventually reveals itself to be, however many complications it has, a fundamentally simple story.
And Scott, to his credit, recognizes that and…
Nobody ever really talks about Michael Fassbender's acting in this movie, probably because there isn't much to talk about. Where Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt are all at minimum vivid–the beneficiaries of very careful styling and costume design—Fassbender is vague, blurry, and out of focus even within the pitiless digital clarity of Dariusz Wolski's cinematography. He's playing a cipher so empty he doesn't even have a first name, much less the kind of inner life that would make his final recognition of his transgressions—and their tragic, lethal consequences—register on an emotional level. But then for this cold stainless-steel bolito of a movie to work, at least in the way its supporters claim, the Counselor's ultimate despondency has to…
Like many others, I've spent the last years pretty much loathing Ridley Scott - shoddy handheld images with relentless CGI all delivered in a monotonous color schemes. So here's something different: straightforward shots, exacting compositions, layers of depth, very specific backgrounds and uses of mise-en-scene, and camera dollies all on direct straight lines. I’ve never been more excited to see a filmmaker abandon his “style.” In The Counselor, there are no blending of spaces; each place has its very own distinct visual look (the yellow hued Juarez, the pure white home of Counselor, Bardem’s garish purple wall and excessive TV screens),and each character his own individual identity (see Fassbender's clean cut black shirt and khakis against Bardem's outlandish hair and…