Phil Mercer

Monday, January 07, 2008

No Country for Old Men

 

The Coen brothers have created another modern western using the Cormac McCarthy novel as a base and keeping pretty honest to it throughout.

This is one of those films that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It is a very tense 122 minutes!

We follow Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) as he walks in to an aborted drugs handover, where there are no survivors and tries to profit from it by walking off with a large suitcase of cash.

Obviously the guys who actually own this money want it back, so they employ the assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) to hunt it down.

Chigurh is a pretty nasty bloke, completely cold and emotionless in the death and destruction he leaves behind him. His weapon of choice is an air compressor cattle gun, chilling.

So will Moss avoid Chigurh and keep his wife safe? Will the local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) get there first and solve the riddle of all these deaths in time.

Even though it is very gritty and could be a film full of despair, the Coen brothers manage to pepper some humour throughout. Woody Harrelson makes an all to short appearance. The deaths can be quite ludicrous which helps take the edge off it.

This is a masterpiece that will have your nerves frayed and Adrenalin running but all the while the film is actually moving at a sometimes painfully slow pace.

Oscar and Golden Globes potential here.
4/5

Release 18th Jan 2008

Labels: Film Movie

# posted by Phil @ 1:36 pm

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