Life

No good advice

IT'S been a couple of days since I saw The Counselor. While the jury is still how on much I actually enjoyed Ridley Scott's latest film, one thing is for certain: I'm stilI thinking about it.

The Counselor boasts a great cast of big Hollywood names - Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz - no doubt attracted by the double whammy of Scott at the helm and Cormac McCarthy on screenwriting duty.

McCarthy is a great novelist, as anyone who read The Road or No Country For Old Men will surely attest.

However, the movie versions of both those McCarthy books succeeded because the screenwriters (Joe Penhall and the Coen brothers respectively) worked so hard on distilling their wonderfully wordy and profound literary essence into film-friendly form. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at times McCarthy's screenplay for The Counselor feels like one of his novels lifted word-for-word from page to screen.

The Counselor is full of characters delivering lengthy, profound monologues on a whim.

Of all the actors required to rhyme off deep, philosophical musings apropos of nothing much, Diaz fares the worst.

Her caricature-esque character, Malkina, is a ferocious femme fatale with a big-cat fetish and disturbing lack of moral fibre.

This proverbial man-eater spends the film teasing and terrifying just about everyone she comes into contact with.

Would The Counselor be a better film without her long, rambling monologue on the inherent sexuality of cheetahs hunting their prey on the prairie? Not necessarily.

However, it would definitely benefit from said speech being delivered without the thousand-yard stare of a student actor furiously concentrating on remembering her lines during the Big Scene in the end-of-term play.

Luckily for Diaz, by this stage we've already witnessed Malkina having sex with an Italian supercar as her beau Reiner (Javier Bardem) looks on through his increasingly smeared windscreen. This kind of rarely seen spectacle is likely to trump wooden monologues in the memory of most movie-goers.

The Counselor has some strong ideas about men, women and sex: I'm still not sure exactly what they are.

Opening with a fairly full-on (though tenderly realised) bedroom scene between Fassbender's titular legal man and his beloved Laura (Penelope Cruz), there's plenty of full and frank sex talk throughout the picture, with Bardem's gauche nightclub owner turned drug dealer and his slick Texan partner Westray (Brad Pitt) displaying some pretty misogynistic attitudes to the fairer sex.

The Counselor himself is about the only man in the film who seems to actually like women, a factor that's perhaps instrumental in sealing his particular fate.

As for Malinka, she's the worst of the lot - an amoral predator with an endless appetite for money, vice and power.

The story revolves around Fassbender's shady lawyer and his ill-fated decision to dabble in drug running, prompted by unspecified financial straits. Initially, there's a lot of talking about how it's probably a Very Bad Idea. When things inevitably go sideways, the talky doom and gloom ramps up to near fever pitch levels. But it's not all talk: Ridley Scott seems to be channelling his late brother Tony's (Top Gun, Enemy of the State) penchant for spectacle in this film. Thus, we're treated to a couple of amusingly graphic decapitations, a decent car chase and a pleasingly tense shoot-out.

Scott also injects a fair amount of glitz into the visuals of The Counselor, painting a lurid portrait of the big money/low morality world at the American end of the US/Mexican narcotics trade.

This is sharply contrasted with the literally s**t-stained nature of the operations south of the border, where life is cheap and everyone lives in fear of the cut-throat cartels.

It all adds up to a slick-looking movie that manages to keep you watching even while you're not sure exactly what's going on.

Such confusion helps us identify with the counsellor himself, who quickly finds himself way out of his depth.

In general, Fassbender is really good here. Bardem also acquits himself well in another flamboyant role, while Pitt is as irritatingly cool, calm and cocky as ever.

If you can cope with the high level of confusion and pretension on offer, The Counselor is definitely worth a watch - but it might have made an even better read as a McCarthy novel.