Alfred Hitchcock once noted that if you show a gun in the first act, it will have to be fired in the third. Thus when "The Counselor" has Javier Bardem's sleazy, mob-connected nightclub owner explain to his lawyer what a bolito is — a small battery-powered garrotte that locks around a victim's neck and rapidly slices through — we know that heads will eventually roll. The only question is: whose?
Director Ridley Scott clearly knows his Hitch, and perhaps another of the director's dictums inspired him here as well: "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." Scott has been all over the place stylistically in the past decade — from mythic science fiction ("Prometheus") to a tearjerker set on a French vineyard ("A Good Year") — but "The Counselor," based on an original screenplay by noted author Cormac McCarthy, sees him getting all dark and nasty in a sordid Southwestern film noir.
If I was feeling cynical I'd say this is Scott's Coen Bros. movie; McCarthy's script seems to have been written with the idea of reworking his "No Country For Old Men" template, and the presence of Bardem in the cast — with crazy hair — only reinforces that feeling of déjà vu. The portrayal of Mexican drug gang brutality and its inescapable reach is also of a piece with Oliver Stone's "Savages."