THE COUNSELOR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - If you must see this movie, do not pay to see it. Its makers do not deserve a single penny. Anyone who exhibits it does not deserve a single penny. In fact, anyone who pays for this movie is a chump of the highest order and deserves a good face-sitting from someone who has not wiped or washed for weeks.

A lawyer (Michael Fassbender) needs money to buy his gal (Penélope Cruz) an expensive engagement ring from Bruno Ganz (who will henceforth always look like Adolph Hitler thanks to his performance in Downfall). The cash-strapped lawyer decides to score some quick wads of dough in a drug deal set up by a client (Javier Bardem) whose girlfriend (Cameron Diaz) humps windshields. A Heineken-loving middleman (Brad Pitt) moves the deal forward. Things go awry. Many die.

*NOTE* My lowest rating for a motion picture is 1 PUBIC HAIR. A movie must truly earn the right to such a hallowed position. Normally, a film like THE COUNSELOR would deserve the lowest rating I can bestow, but if I did that, I fear I would be causing injury to a motion picture like SHARKNADO. I am therefore compelled to create a NEW rating lower than a PUBIC HAIR. So, for Sir Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy's aborted fetus pretending to be a movie, I hereby announce a rating even lower. I hereby call it: TURD DISCOVERED BEHIND "HARRY'S CHAR BROIL & DINING LOUNGE". The new rating will be accompanied by the photo of the real thing:

The Counselor (2013)

RATING: TURD DISCOVERED BEHIND
"HARRY'S CHAR BROIL & DINING LOUNGE"
Dir. Sir Ridley Scott
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz,
Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Bruno Ganz, Rosie Pérez, Rubén Blades, John Leguizamo

Review By Greg Klymkiw

So I'm sitting there watching this thing and listening to the worst pillow talk dialogue imaginable between Michael Fassbender and Penélope Cruz while they loll about under a blanket and just before Fassbender starts to muff dive Cruz, she suggests she needs to clean her pussy and Fassbender tells her he'd prefer to lap up the smegma, dried-Fassbender-spunk and all other manner of the viscous fluids and Krusty Kremes churning around "down there" and while he starts Hoovering it all up, Cruz has the temerity to tell him how to do it and I'm, like, not only on the verge of puking, but a tad annoyed that she'd dare be making any suggestions as to his tongue-action at all as he's graciously offered to spic n' span her sullied vaginal septic tank sans a thorough douching.

I suspected at this point in the proceedings I might be in for a rough ride with this one.

But THEN I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that The Counselor had only one direction to go when I was force-fed one idiotic, pointless scene after another wherein the film's characters yapped endlessly in some preposterous Cormac McCarthy pidgin code blending the worst hardboiled dialogue imaginable with obtusely stupid and simplistic speechifying and philosophizing.

All of this moronic babble-speak is occasionally punctuated with dollops of extreme violence (none of it directed with any panache whatsoever), including shootings, stabbings and beheadings.

And then, there is a sequence wherein Cameron Diaz humps the windshield of Javier Bardem's Ferrari.

Now, on paper, all this must sound potentially delectable, like some crazed melodramatic 70s male existential angst crime drama directed by John Waters after a lobotomy administered by Dr. Cukrowicz in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, but I can assure you it's not that promising. Sir Ridley Scott's direction which, seems to grow increasingly bereft of anything resembling competence is not even worthy of being termed as the work of a hack. It's well below that: unmotivated camera moves, inertly ugly compositions, lifeless herky-jerky action sequences, no attention to detail of any consequence and worst of all, a slavish adherence to the worst writing of Cormac McCarthy's entire career.

This is the novelist's original screenplay debut - way to go, Cormac!

The movie makes absolutely no sense and yet, its pathetic attempts at mystery are anything but mysterious. Anyone who can't see from the beginning that Cameron Diaz is the shady puppet master of all the betrayals and supposed twists must surely be a bear of very little brain. Even if her complicity in the double-triple-quadruple-crosses is supposed to be obvious, it makes no real sense and if not making sense is the intention, then it's just not achieved with anything resembling skill, artistry or purpose (though its writer and any of his apologists might think otherwise).

Of course, the film's fake, surface nihilism is ultimately supposed to be the point - one supposes - and I sure have no problem with that, but not one single second of this abominable film has any entertainment value whatsoever. Worst of all, the movie is just plain dull and humourless, though it appears as if there are a few lame, lunkheaded attempts to insert some darkly-tinged jocularity into the proceedings.

All through the movie, characters of seeming import are given long dialogue scenes and speeches. One assumes there was some point to all of this, but whatever it was, I'll concede that those who can suggest what it might be are better men/women than I. To them, I bestow a certificate of merit. For what, I'm not sure, but I give it to them anyway (just as I give Messrs. Scott and McCarthy the aforementioned rancid turd).

By the end of the movie, we watch every major character get bumped off. We even get to see characters who seem to be important, but who are unfamiliar to us get bumped off. We even get to see characters of NO importance who are unfamiliar to us get bumped off. I, for one, feel like anyone who thought they were making a good movie here, deserve a right royal bumping off along with every character who bites the arsenic biscuit in this dreadful movie.

Thinking on it, though, death is probably too good for them. I think we need to line them all up to get face-fucked by Cameron Diaz, but only if her pussy is as purportedly filthy as Penélope Cruz's is when Fassbender snuffles into it at the beginning of the movie.

Maybe it can be lots dirtier even.

"The Counselor" is in wide release all over the world. Good movies can't even get screens. In fact, good movies have a hard time getting made. If you really think you need to see this movie, download the worst cam torrent you can find. No need to give these clowns a penny of your dough. In fact, a grotty torrent download might even improve the movie.