The Counselor 2013

Mary F. Pols, TIME Magazine: Plays like a parody of a Cormac McCarthy adaptation...It's derivative nonsense. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Nearly every plot twist is telegraphed by reams of stilted dialogue provided by novelist Cormac McCarthy in his first original screenplay. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: The cast is all but suffocated by the sententious dialogue of an airless drama. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: You wait for "The Counselor" to get started and finally realize it never will - but you can, at least, enjoy the pictures. Read more

Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture: Deeply convoluted, and at times howlingly insane. But it knows it makes no sense. In fact, it rubs our faces in it. Read more

Peter Debruge, Variety: Cormac McCarthy's first original script is nearly all dialogue, but it's a lousy story, ineptly constructed and rendered far too difficult to follow. Read more

A.A. Dowd, AV Club: No amount of needless chatter can quite dilute the power of The Counselor's grim endgame, especially given the way its writer and director conspire to keep the threat offscreen, like some terrible, unseen force of nature. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: It's an OK movie that seems like it should have been a great one, but falls well short of that mark. Read more

Tom Russo, Boston Globe: It escalates into a spin through wilder country, and a meditation on bigger themes. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: This tony crime thriller exploits the brutality of the Central American drug trade for shock value but transpires mainly in the cool, moneyed world of the callous rich. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: The narrative twists itself into pretzels trying to stay ahead of the audience. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Movies can be like undercover cops: They become too enamored of the worlds they explore. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: "The Counselor" is guilty on all counts. Read more

Cary Darling, Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com: Those sounds you hear are the sighs of relief from Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake. Runner Runner is no longer 2013's worst thriller. Read more

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: Considering the deep bench of A-list talent involved, Ridley Scott's new Southwestern noir, The Counselor, is a jaw-dropping misfire. Read more

Kate Erbland, Film.com: The only joy is in a horrified desire to see what craziness happens next. Read more

Wesley Morris, Grantland: It's filthy, nasty, sexy, absurd, appalling, and exhilarating, and it succeeds as a musky union of novelist Cormac McCarthy's bleakness and Ridley Scott's sense of chic. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: Despite its scaldingly hot cast and formidable writer/director combination, The Counselor is simply not a very likable or gratifying film. In fact, it's a bummer. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: As cold, precise and soulless as the diamonds that figure briefly in its plot, "The Counselor" is an extremely unpleasant piece of business. Read more

Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News: The action is all but blatantly telegraphed, even as McCarthy keeps shuttling his characters around from Amsterdam to Mexico. Read more

Connie Ogle, Miami Herald: The Counselor is more Wild Things than No Country for Old Men, with which it shares a border town setting. But at least Wild Things knew what it was. Read more

David Thomson, The New Republic: The Counselor is a very bad film, and I suspect that a lot of the actors knew that already as they did their work. It lacks clarity, plausibility, suspense, and purpose. Read more

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: "The Counselor" is a disaster on nearly every level, but it all starts with McCarthy's muddled, mean-spirited screenplay. Read more

Richard Brody, New Yorker: Each scene serves as little more than an index card for the mechanistic plot, which Scott films in a glossy and fluid style befitting an industrial promotion for the movie's high-tech weaponry. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: The film seems an hour longer than it is, with too many scenes that go nowhere. Read more

Ian Buckwalter, NPR: If The Counselor is a failure, it's at least a fascinating one. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: Ultimately, this dull tour of a thieving, primal underworld is just a lot of high-talking hogwash. Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Mr. Scott's seriousness isn't always well served by the scripts he films, but in Mr. McCarthy he has found a partner with convictions about good and evil rather than canned formula. Read more

Michael Sragow, Orange County Register: [A] gaudy pseudo-existential crime drama. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: It's not so much a bad film as it is a disappointing one. A very disappointing one. Read more

Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com: Sexy, complicated, smart, violent. Cool. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: The Counselor [is] a droning meditation on capitalism in the form of a thriller about cocaine trading on the Tex-Mex border. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: It's like a mumblecore movie about a bunch of Sarah Lawrence philosophy majors, made by coked-up rich people for 100 bajillion dollars. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: It contains memorable dialogue, vivid characters and several superb scenes, and yet it still manages to be wrong, a complete miscalculation. Read more

Forrest Wickman, Slate: Novelists don't always make good screenwriters-this is the first film for which McCarthy has written the screenplay himself-and The Counselor's nihilism soon becomes tedious. Read more

Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press: Wait, who IS this guy? Where did he come from? Did I miss something? Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: A legendary filmmaker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author tackle exotic locales, twisted crime and a man in over his head, and somehow produce two hours of baffling tedium. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: In its cross-cultural breadth, director Ridley Scott's smart and violent film merits comparison to Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," but the dialogue delivered by the stellar cast is incomparably McCarthy's. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: An uncommonly erudite thriller built around the pulpiest of stories. Read more

Guy Lodge, Time Out: A great writer's pompous idea of pulp fiction, treated with stultifying seriousness by everyone else involved. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Everyone's speech is awash in gaudy psycho-blather and Yoda-like observations. Read more

Sam Weisberg, Village Voice: The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth. Read more

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: "The Counselor" must have looked great on paper, but you can't believe a word of it. Read more