Enough to sap the soul

The Counselor(12a)
Running time 117 minutes
Rating:*
As soon as you see the bleak, bleached desert landscape of the Texas and Mexico borderlands, you get a bad feeling about where The Counselor is going to end up.
The second, third and fourth clues to the outcome of the film come with the ‘18’ rating, the fact that they don’t spell counsellor the way we like it, and the film is written by Cormac McCarthy. Who can forget the thoroughly depressing plot of No Country for Old Men?
Yes, folks, we’re back in the land of drugs, murder and free enterprise, where life is cheap, and death only has meaning if you want a character in your film to go on and on about how people should give up all hope in Mexico and help the cartels by cutting their own throats.
There is not one single redeeming character in the whole 117-minute film – apart from a barman at the end who sympathises with a man who is the walking dead, but even then fails to do anything to help him.
The story tells of a rich and successful lawyer (Michael Fassbender), who from greed or some other unstated reason, wants to get involved with a $20m drug shipment from Mexico to Chicago. He is lured in by one of his clients, a sleazy club owner called Reiner (Javier Bardem), who enlists the aid of an equally sleazy middleman called Westray (Brad Pitt) to seal the deal.
It all goes wrong, with various cartels stealing the shipment from one another and leaving dead bodies (some headless) all over the place. The counselor’s wife (Penelope Cruz) is kidnapped as a punishment, and Reiner is shot, while his girlfriend (Cameron Diaz) shows an inventive use of a car windscreen during a “love” scene.
There is much shooting and no-one displays an ounce of humanity. Those who are not actually psychopaths show little or no morality.
If Mexico was hoping that inviting famous director Ridley Scott, along with all the A-listers mentioned above, to the country was going to raise the profile as a tourist destination, then The Counselor will be a sad disappointment.
If however, you want to portray the country as tottering just this side of the Seventh Circle of Hell, then a fine job has been done.
I didn’t much like No Country for Old Men, although its bleak and casual brutality was startling, but this is a poor show where acting talent is wasted muttering second-rate dialogue while wearing strange clothes.
The violence is inventive, as apparently Mexican cartels delight in thinking up increasingly public displays of their indifference to life. However, even that loses its impact eventually and you are left wishing that someone would just wipe out the lot of them instead of making films that, for some, inadvertently glorify what they do.
Avoid if possible.