Spoilers
This movie sucks.
Cormac McCarthy writes shit stories that are somehow viewed as High Art and Great Literature. The Road and No Country For Old Men are pretty much downers. So I should have hit the STOP button as soon as I saw McCarthy’s name in the opening credits of The Counselor. Sadly, I didn’t.
There are a lot of shows where people suffer and die. Game of Thrones is pretty much nothing but people suffering and dying. All cop shows deal with death as a matter of course. Doctor shows also involve a lot of suffering. But these shows generally set things up so that the deaths don’t matter. Sherlock and Bones see dead people all the time and they are nothing but clues to the puzzle.
What made Breaking Bad so great was that it brought human suffering to a more realistic level. Desperation and revenge and revelations would leave you breathless at the end of each episode. When someone died in Breaking Bad, that life mattered. That’s the key to great drama, we feel like what happens in the story matters.
In The Counselor, we have a lot of graphic violence, a lot of cold-blooded murder, and the villain rides off into the sunset to live happily ever after. People are killed left and right. They are mostly bad people, but they are also killed by mostly bad people. There are no heroes here, only bad guys and their victims. Nothing that happens makes any sense. Random acts lead to massive overkill and over reaction.
In The Counselor nothing mattered. Our hero, such as he was, was powerless. The bag guys were omnipresent and omnipotent. Damnit, even Theon eventually escaped Ramsay Bolton! The message here is a pure and simple Life Sucks and Keeps On Sucking and everyone dies, except the one person you want to die.
There was nothing good about The Counselor.
- Starfield – A Few Months In - December 23, 2023
- Still Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton - November 1, 2022
- Starfield First Impressions of Gameplay Reveal - June 13, 2022
