THE COUNSELLOR

Ridley Scott's "The Counsellor" is a mess, particularly in its extended cut, but it's a magnificent mess. It's virtually plotless or rather it has a plot so complicated it's virtually impossible to figure out what's going on or who's doing what to whom, suffice to say it has something to do with drug cartels operating along the US/Mexican border. The counsellor is Michael Fassbender who's a kind of go-between between the various parties, one of whom is Javier Bardem's over-sexed drugs lord. Another is Brad Pitt's mysterious cowboy who claims he can walk away from it all as needs be. There are two women involved as well; Penelope Cruz as the counsellor's long-suffering girlfriend and Cameron Diaz as Bardem's woman and the one who totes the guns and wears the pants in that relationship. Other sundry characters drift in and out and there are some brilliantly staged action sequences but mostly this is a talkative picture comprising long stretches of dialogue between just two characters. Luckily the script is by Cormac McCarthy so the talk is always good even if we think it's not always leading us anywhere.

The acting, too, is all over the place. Fassbender may be the central character yet his role feels underwritten; it's an awkward and unconvincing performance. A better actor could have worked wonders with this part, Cruz, too, is simply wan. On the other hand, both Bardem and Diaz have a lot of fun as a couple of nut-jobs and Pitt walks off with the movie as the philosophising gangster. It also looks magnificent thanks to Dariusz Wolski's superb cinematography. For the most part the critics hated it, (my friend Murtaza Ali being a rare exception). It's certainly hard work; with a more comprehensible plot it might have been a masterpiece. As it stands, it's a failure but it's still a lot better than many more 'successful' films I've seen this year and it really shouldn't be missed.