THE COUNSELOR

It’s an odd feeling when you leave a cinema and you have no idea what the movie you just spent two hours watching was about. More importantly, after watching a Ridley Scott film - a director whose name alone incites revery and awe - you struggle to remember the last decent film he made.

When a wealthy, amoral Texan lawyer (Michael Fassbender) gets a serious case of greed, he enters into a drug trafficking deal with some of his shadier clients. When it all goes horribly awry, he struggles to right the wrong as a stranger in this world, and as the people involved start dropping like flies.

Each scene is a litany of over-written pretentious dialogue that, rather than taking you from A to B, sends you far into the stratosphere of confusion. It’s possible screenwriter Cormac McCarthy, in his first foray into screenwriting, struggled to adapt his own novel from page to screen while still showcasing the mastery and intelligence behind cross-border drug trafficking. Nonetheless, it’s all lost through a convoluted story, numerous unexplained and underdeveloped characters, and being simply confounding from the get-go.