The Counselor (2013)
1/10
The Counselor: I Advise You to Stay Away
28 October 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Down in Mexico, drugs flow like water. When a successful lawyer decides to go into business with criminals to get a piece of the action, the blood starts flowing too. The Counselor focuses on the Counselor (Michael Fassbender) and his business dealings after he becomes engaged to Laura (Penelope Cruz). With things going smoothly in his life, the Counselor tries to make some money on the side by getting himself mixed in with drug trafficking and opening a club with his friend, Reiner (Javier Bardem). Being a successful businessman and criminal, Reiner is mixed up in a confusing sexual relationship with Malkina (Cameron Diaz) who ultimately has ulterior motives from standing by Reiner's side. With the club being funded by Westray (Brad Pitt), things for the Counselor could not be better, that is until one of his clients, Ruth (Rosie Perez), calls the Counselor from jail, and asks him to get her son released from jail over a speeding ticket.

Thinking nothing of it, the Counselor gets Ruth's son out of jail. Once released, the son meets a man at a coffee house, picks up a device that belongs on the truck that is trafficking drugs, and leaves the meeting. All the while, an assassin had been spying on the meeting, and set a trap for Ruth's son, who speeds down the roads at over 200 MPH. After the son is dead, the assassin collects the device, and leaves the body in the road. The people Ruth's son were working for suspect the Counselor was behind the killing, since he freed the son from jail. Fearing for their lives, the Counselor, Reiner, and Westray scramble to save themselves.

Plain and simple, The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott, is awful. The movie does not make any sense. The opening scene is an awkward lovemaking scene between Fassbender's Counselor and Cruz's Laura, and then proceeds to have sex as an underlying theme in the movie, which was, in my opinion, completely unnecessary. The movie is confusing enough without adding aspects that do not even remotely make sense in context. Throughout the entire 117 minutes, The Counselor jumps from scene to scene, plot point to plot point, without any sort of transition or explanation. To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what the movie was even about until I looked it up when I got back from the theater. Drugs were only seen twice, at the beginning and the end of the movie, and only mentioned once, which was strange given the fact that the movie was about drug trafficking. The acting was OK. None of the actors stood out and gave memorable performances. The storytelling was sloppy and haphazardly thrown together, and the writing was terrible. Quite frankly, my favorite part of the movie was the end credits.

Of the duds of October movie releases (Runner Runner, The Fifth Estate), The Counselor is by far the WORST of them all. Granted, I gave Runner Runner and OK review and The Fifth Estate an mediocre review at best, I would recommend those movies a thousand times before I would recommend The Counselor once. The movie was sloppily made, confusing, poorly written, uninteresting, and boring. If I could give it a lower number of stars I would but I cannot, so I stick with one star, and I beg you, please save your money.

Rating: 1 of 10

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