Photo Credit IMDB

By Nia Rutledge

This week I watched The Counselor. The movie was directed by Ridley Scott and the screenplay was written by Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy originally wrote the novel version of The Counselor (Which, I have no interest in reading based on the movie). The cast is full of beautiful, talented actors. Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, and Brad Pitt are the main ones I recognized.

Every time i turned on the TV I’m pretty sure that I saw the trailer for this movie. It looked really action-packed. Usually, i’m not a big fan of the typical “drug-smuggling” movies,but the trailer made the film seem better. Plus, with a cast like that, how could it be unenjoyable? I didn’t know much about the film besides what the trailer entails, because I didn’t even look up a short summary on it.

This movie really has no plot at all. The movie doesn’t really make sense. It’s hard to follow, but not in an intellectual way. Throughout the film i was waiting for it to take a direction and for the extremely tense, high energy, climax to hit me. In the beginning it didn’t bother me because some expositions take a bit to establish themselves. I was just waiting for something to happen in the film and it wasn’t until I was 50 minutes in that I realized that the movie was just boring.

The majority of the movie consisted of weak dialogue in which they sprinkled in little philosophical one-liners. It seemed really odd and a failure at trying to make the character less one dimensional. All of the characters are typical, nothing you haven’t seen before. As far as the acting goes, it was not the best performance that the actors could have given. It wasn’t particularly bad, but it wasn’t good. I don’t blame them though, there’s only so much you can do with a typical character and bad lines. On the brightside, Michael Fassbender ugly-cries two or three times throughout the duration of the movie. Which is pretty funny, I’m not gonna lie.

The movie looked good. Though, it wasn’t on behalf of interesting camera angles. I believe they did some work with add a lot of saturation in the colors of the film so it gave it that pop. Besides that, you’ve seen all the angles before. Nothing special. Nothing bad.

After I finished watching, the movie i still felt like I hadn’t reached the “Big Shabang” moment. It all felt like rising action, getting nowhere. The movie ended abruptly which made me think that there will be a part two. (please, no). The film was almost two hours long and it didn’t do much with it’s time. There are only three times in the whole movie that I said “Oh, that was cool”. Everything else was really boring and pretty uneventful.

I could not even give you a plot summary of this movie. I would definitely not recommend this to anyone. All it is a bad drug smuggling that tries to make up for the weak plot by roping you in with sex, beautiful people, and those one-liners. If i had to guess the filmmakers said “Let’s try to make the next classic film”, so they tried to concoct a good movie by having pretty people, drugs, sex, murder, and philosophical dialogue (not even close to actually proking a thought). The result was a film that has no plot at all, I it think has potential, but it wasted it’s shot. This movie is over-hyped and you do not need to see it. I promise, all the good parts are in the trailer.

Overall Rating: 4.5/10