I admire Ridley Scott as much as the next guy. He's great with actors and he's a great visual artist, but if there's one vice he suffers from, it's this. Scott has a penchant for picking bad scripts to film. He's *always* been wildly inconsistent with that, not merely in his last ten years, and in plenty of non-negligible cases, has had to go so far as to use his direction to mask the flaws of the writing. This was especially the case for films like Hannibal, 1492, Legend, A Good Year, and the notorious plot holes of Prometheus. I respect him for always trying to stretch his versatility, but his scripts don't do his strengths justice, and his last decade alone has been even patchier than Tim Burton's.
The reason I say that is because The Counselor is yet another example of this. I know Cormac McCarthy is a great author (in fact, he wrote my favorite book, No Country for Old Men), but what makes him great in literature doesn't make him so in cinema. His script feels like it was originally meant for a book but trimmed for the screen, and it shows. The film expects us to immediately accept the reality of the situation, shorting us on crucial details behind the relationships of characters, something that even the awkward exposition can't fix. These characters are so middlingly established that I simply can't care about them. Another indication that it was meant for the page is that the script is incredibly busy and needlessly convoluted. It feels like several different movies are going on at once with nothing tying them together, and full of elements that go absolutely nowhere. As a book, this could be easily expanded upon and you could get away with this kind of busy structure, but in film, it's talky, dull, and loaded with redundancy (We get it, Cormac, actions have consequences). That even extends into the visuals with repeated imagery of cheetahs, no doubt to foreshadow the hungry predators about to descend upon the unwary prey of main characters... SYMBOLISM!
Ridley Scott is trying his best to wrangle it all together, but no matter how hard he tries, he just can't generate any suspense from this film, and one of the only good scenes is setting up the wire on the road, because it's one of the few moments with no unneeded dialogue. There's too few of those tense moments present in the film, and despite the best efforts of the cast members, great actors can only elevate bad material so much (none dumber and more horrendous than Cameron Diaz screwing a car), and it makes for yet another blunder for Scott.
The reason I say that is because The Counselor is yet another example of this. I know Cormac McCarthy is a great author (in fact, he wrote my favorite book, No Country for Old Men), but what makes him great in literature doesn't make him so in cinema. His script feels like it was originally meant for a book but trimmed for the screen, and it shows. The film expects us to immediately accept the reality of the situation, shorting us on crucial details behind the relationships of characters, something that even the awkward exposition can't fix. These characters are so middlingly established that I simply can't care about them. Another indication that it was meant for the page is that the script is incredibly busy and needlessly convoluted. It feels like several different movies are going on at once with nothing tying them together, and full of elements that go absolutely nowhere. As a book, this could be easily expanded upon and you could get away with this kind of busy structure, but in film, it's talky, dull, and loaded with redundancy (We get it, Cormac, actions have consequences). That even extends into the visuals with repeated imagery of cheetahs, no doubt to foreshadow the hungry predators about to descend upon the unwary prey of main characters... SYMBOLISM!
Ridley Scott is trying his best to wrangle it all together, but no matter how hard he tries, he just can't generate any suspense from this film, and one of the only good scenes is setting up the wire on the road, because it's one of the few moments with no unneeded dialogue. There's too few of those tense moments present in the film, and despite the best efforts of the cast members, great actors can only elevate bad material so much (none dumber and more horrendous than Cameron Diaz screwing a car), and it makes for yet another blunder for Scott.