The Counselor

Director: Ridley Scott
Year Released: 2013
Rating: 0.0

A successful lawyer (Michael Fassbender) somehow ends up in the drug trade (lured in by comically done-up Javier Bardem and sleazy Brad Pitt), but when a shipment is taken, the drug cartels want him dead. It would take a Nobel Prize nominee (and Pulitzer Prize winner) in Cormac McCarthy to make something this downright awful: not only is the dialogue simply horrible (the sexy-dirty dialogue between Fassbender and girlfriend Penélope Cruz starts this in an unintentionally silly direction), many of the scenes are ludicrous (Diaz "catfishing" the windshield of a sports car) and the plot incoherent (all the malevolent plotting is basically done off-screen) - for McCarthy's gifts as a novelist, he is simply incapable of making Fassbender, who makes a very bad decision, much of a sympathetic character (though Fassbender tries, to his credit, to look as pained as possible). I expected something more from the guy who wrote Blood Meridian and Suttree than "Mexico is a dangerous place with its own rules." As for cleaning the windshield: it's going to take more than wiper fluid.