Critics reviews

In the director's commentary for the excellent Blu-ray of The Counselor, the most underrated and indeed ridiculously maligned film of 2013, Ridley Scott muses that the proliferation of devices and the amount of time people spend looking at media hasn't made them more sophisticated. If anything, audiences have less tolerance than ever for movies that don't spoon-feed them the story.

The Counselor features alongside its depressingly obvious visual metaphors and gratingly faux-astere brutality a two-for-one special of alternately neurasthenic and embarrassingly over-cranked acting: understandably tuckered out after his 12 Years a Slave pratfalls, Michael Fassbender gives perhaps the first truly lazy performance of his career, while Diaz... gives 'er with the intensity of a true believer.

The Counsellor is indeed quite maddening. It's obvious that the film is doing something unusual and potentially interesting – but its actual pleasures are few and far between... The Counsellor is a fascinating film, but it's diminished by the brevity of our lives: it's got Death on the brain, and its morbid obsession ends up sucking all the energy out of it. It's singular and fatalistic, and by all means watch it. Just don't expect to enjoy it.

What is original about the film is the way it works through the film noir story template in a fashion more akin to Greek tragedy and horror films, setting up ominous suggestions of things that will come to pass with hints of oracular and morally significant purpose, and then following through on them unrelentingly.

Between them, Scott and McCarthy have created a film that in less accomplished hands could have slumped into melodrama, but that retains the grim humour, and the granitic implacability, of a classic morality tale.

The script spreads the action worldwide and paper-thin, and the supporting luminaries... are stuck playing clichés who spout clichés. The dialogue alternates between throwaway snark and pseudo-philosophical criminal cant; each scene serves as little more than an index card for the mechanistic plot, which Scott films in a glossy and fluid style befitting an industrial promotion for the movie's high-tech weaponry.

...These instances of [negative] hyperbole have probably emboldened The Counselor's inevitable and eventual status as a misunderstood masterpiece within enthusiastic circles that unquestioningly accept Scott's, and particularly, McCarthy's artistic sainthood. To react so strongly, even negatively, to The Counselor is to weirdly overrate it, as it's just a bad movie—a dull bit of hokum puffed up with its creators' delusions of grandeur.

The Counselor has the heartless verve of filmmakers half their ages. It's filthy, nasty, sexy, absurd, appalling, and exhilarating, and it succeeds as a musky union of novelist Cormac McCarthy's bleakness and Ridley Scott's sense of chic.

[McCarthy's] wordplay is rich, rhythmic, clearly the product of someone in love with language and everything it can both conceal and reveal, but listen closely and you will also hear the espousing of a philosophy of the world, where love is a mirage and only in death may we find something like redemption. "The Counselor" is one of the best films Ridley Scott has made in a career that is not often enough credited for just how remarkable it has been.

It's as if Scott, McCarthy and their all-star cast, which also includes Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem, could not stop themselves from making the worst movie in the history of the universe (or at any rate, one of the worst I've ever seen). Yet at the same time, they felt honor-bound to poison the well subtly by turning the film into a self-referential commentary on its own terribleness.

What works for [screenwriter Cormac McCarthy] in a novel cannot be said to work for him here. The dialogue in "The Counselor" might kindly be termed "heightened," or it might unkindly be termed the most self-consciously significant gabbing since the days of Paddy Chayefsky.

The usually dominant and stolid director Ridley Scott allows McCarthy's penchant for insanely verbose dialogue to swamp the movie. Leonard's chatter amongst crooks is a model of economy and wit; McCarthy's is piled high with past participles, run-on phrases, clauses tumbling into more clauses, sentences so obtuse they could only exist on the page and never be spoken.