The Counsellor

UK Release Date. 15 November 2013
Certification. 18
Running Time. 1 hour 57 mins
Director. Ridley Scott
Cast. Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Michael Fassbender, Rosie Perez, Brad Pitt.
Rating. 25%

Review.

The Counsellor was the first venture into screenwriting for acclaimed American writer, Cormac McCarthy - the author of such revered titles as Blood Meridian, All the pretty horses and No country for old men. Paired with veteran director Ridley Scott and supported by a stellar cast comprising of Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Michael Fassbender, Bruno Ganz, John Leguizamo, Rosie Perez, Brad Pitt and Edgar Ramirez, how could The Counsellor possibly falter?

What transpires is that good authors do not always make good screenwriters.

Ridley Scott follows the overly ambitious Prometheus with a more intimate offering. When lawyer (Michael Fassbender) enters into financing a drug deal, he soon realises that he has placed himself and his new fiancée (Penélope Cruz) in danger from a brutal, unforgiving drug cartel.

The scant plot is incoherent and the writing is simply awful - the dialogue routinely verbose and esoteric. Seemingly endless soliloquies populate a bloated script, and there are countless instances when important events are engulfed by these long, inane diatribes.  

Critics far and wide panned Cameron Diaz for her performance, and although Diaz is truly appalling in the film, it’s unfair to lay all of the blame at her feet. Her character, Malkina is poorly written, to the point of caricature, where a manipulative, overly sexualised femme fatale becomes ugly and repugnant. In one extraordinary scene Diaz appears to have sex with a car windshield, while her partner, Reiner (Javier Bardem) compares her vagina to the mouth of "...one of those catfish things, you know, one of those bottom feeders you see going up the side of the aquarium... ...sucking its way up the glass. Hallucinatory. You see a thing like that, it changes you." 

Yes, The Counsellor shares its DNA with No Country For Old Men, but No Country For Old Men it is not. Whereas, The Coen Brothers produced "an accomplished piece of work", The Counsellor is simply a mess - and quite frankly, it shouldn't have been. 

Ridley Scott is a legendary filmmaker, an auteur who has directed some of my favourite films. However, this does not excuse criticism of his more recent projects; it’s not as if castigation of more recent work diminishes my love of Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. But if we examine Scott's filmography since Prometheus in 2012 - The Counsellor (2013), Exodus: Gods And Kings (2014), The Martian (2015), Alien: Covenant (2017), All The Money In The World (2017), The Last Duel (2021), The House Of Gucci (2021) and Napoleon (2023) - at what point should we start to be concerned for Gladiator II?