Aka The Counselor/Cartel. You have ruined me. Texan lawyer The Counsellor (Michael Fassbender) and girlfriend Laura (Penelope Cruz) are talking dirty to one another in bed. In Mexico, cocaine is packaged in barrels and concealed in a sewage truck and driven across the border where it’s stored at a sewage treatment plant in the US. The Counsellor goes to Amsterdam to meet with a diamond dealer (Bruno Ganz) to buy an engagement ring for Laura. They discuss topics ranging from the business of diamonds, to philosophy surrounding Judaism and its place in the modern world. Back in the US, The Counsellor attends a party back in Texas thrown by Reiner (Javier Bardem) and his girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz). He discusses an upcoming drug deal he is going in on with Reiner, The Counsellor’s first. Reiner describes an execution device called the bolito which gradually strangles then decapitates the victim. At dinner with Laura, The Counsellor presents her with the diamond engagement ring and she accepts his marriage proposal. The Counsellor meets with Reiner’s business associate Westray (Brad Pitt) to deliver his investment for the upcoming drug deal. Westray tells him there is a 4000-percent return rate but warns him about becoming involved because Mexican cartels are merciless. However the Counsellor remains outwardly confident and unconcerned. He visits a prison inmate named Ruth (Rosie Perez) a client of his on trial for murder. Ruth explains that her son is a biker (known as The Green Hornet) (Richard Cabral) who was recently arrested for speeding on his Jet Bike and cannot post bail. She asks the Counsellor for help and he agrees to bail Ruth’s son out for her as a favour. Later, at a club, Reiner tells the Counsellor how disturbed and oddly aroused he was from an incident where he witnessed Malkina masturbate with his Ferrari windshield. Malkina sees an opportunity to undermine the Counsellor’s upcoming deal and to profit for herself. To that end, she employs the Wireman (Sam Spruell) to help her steal the drugs and unleashes a spiral of violence … The beheadings, the mutilations? That’s just business. In which The Riddler turns into his brother Tony Scott to whom this is dedicated, a year following the stylish director’s tragic death. And who would have believed Cormac McCarthy capable of scribing something so utterly gruesome? (Perhaps proving that supposedly great writers just put more sex and grisly description in their work.) Yet it cleaves to essential dramatic rules: if there’s a gun in the first act, and so on. But what is discussed here in the context of tangential dealings with Mexican cocaine cartel operations are decapitations, brutal neck mutilations and snuff videos. So we’re prepared for a repayment in kind to the greedy lawyer who’s in way over his head. In ways there is a moral equivocation here and he who lives by the sword dies by it and all that jazz but no amount of beautiful imagery (by Dariusz Wolski) or fluid cinematic aesthetics can disguise this film’s dark heart and bleak ending. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, that world you have created will also cease to exist. It may or may not be a coincidence that Diaz – playing a pathological liar of sordid immigrant origins – only made three more films then swiftly retired, since she was required to do the splits and orgasm across a car windscreen here: it’s the gynaecological wordage in the aftermath that might have proven distasteful in this Ballardian tribute act. And there’s the ending in a landfill for another significant character parted from their head. And so forth. It’s incredible looking, morally vacant if realistically realised, astonishingly vicious and thrills to endlessly good (if necessarily foreshortened) star performances in exceedingly beautiful clothes by Janty Yates and Giorgio Armani, all underscored by Daniel Pemberton’s intriguing music. Slick, stomach-churning and somehow fascinating. You can do anything to women except bore them
mondomovies 