I liked this movie very much for the first two thirds. The characters are intriguing, the acting is immersive, the story is great. I have nary a complaint. I was riveted to the screen.
Let me start off the list of positives with three words. Tommy Lee Jones. He is amazing in this movie, and I feel that his part gets a bit overshadowed by Javier Bardem. He plays his character of Texas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell with a near perfection. I couldn't take my eyes off of him if he was in the scene. I can say with no qualms at all that he was my favorite character and actor in this movie. I can't imagine anybody else in this role, and yes I actually tried. Every actor I thought of fell short of this performance.
I also really liked the interactions between Llewelyn and Aton. The sort of cat and mouse game that rose up between them really was great to watch, and it kept me very interested. I enjoyed seeing Llewelyn especially, as he was cautious. I enjoyed seeing all the precautions he took, all of which were clever and well thought out. I liked watching two people who seemed to know what they were doing go after each other.
This movie felt very real to me, and that is another reason I liked it. I could very easily see this actually happening in a manner similar to how it happened in this movie. The characters behaved rationally and cleverly, and that really brought them to life. They seemed more like real people and less like fictional characters.
That said, the last third of the movie was just silly. I didn't like it.
Lets start with Woody Harrelson's character, Carson Wells. I don't see what the point of this guy was. He hired to track down the money and Anton, I get that. However after he is hired he somehow magically tracks down Llewelyn in a hospital in Mexico, and then he himself is magically tracked down by Anton and shot. WHY!?! He didn't really have any point. It felt like he was just added to the film in order to showcase how big of a badass that Anton was. It didn't make sense to me and I think the movie would have been better off without that character.
Next off is probably my biggest complaint of the film. Llewelyn is killed at his hotel by the Mexicans. This isn't so bad in itself. I can easily accept the fact that he dies in the plot. What I don't like or understand about it is that we don't see the death at all! We are in Sheriff Ed's car and we hear gunfire and see a truck driving away. We pull into the motel and see Llewelyn's body floating in the pool. Seriously, that's it. The entire movie up to this point has been about him trying to stay alive and keep the money, and then when he is finally killed we don't see it at all. We don't know for sure why he was in the pool, which is uncharacteristic of him from what we know via the movie, and we don't know how he was ambushed. Nothing. This drives me crazy. Why would you kill off the main character (arguably) of a film after getting the audience emotionally invested in him and NOT SHOW US HOW HE DIED? I really just can't get over that, I'm sure the directors have their reasons, but I don't like it and I don't get it.
Lastly is the end. We have the good sheriff talking to his wife at breakfast. He is retired now and he is telling her about a dream he had about his father. He talks about his father waiting on him in what is presumably the afterlife, although I don't think they actually say that specifically. He tells his wife the dream, and the movie ends. It didn't feel like it was over. We previously see Anton get nearly killed in a car wreck and walk away with a very broken arm, then we see the sheriff talk about a dream, then the movie ends. There is no real conclusion to the story. I can sort of understand this as the movie seems to be pointing towards a theme of crime always exists no matter where you are (past, present, future, US, Mexico). If Anton represents crime then his escape makes sense in that regard, but I don't get the dream description at all. I don't understand it's purpose. This might be due to my own ignorance but I just don't get it.
So how do I rate this movie? I love the first 2/3's of it and don't really like the last third at all. I think I'll give it 6.5 coin tosses out of 10.
~Matt
No comments:
Post a Comment