Josh Brolin plays a Vietnam veteran who is out hunting for some food and stumbles across a drug deal gone bad. He takes the money and makes a huge mistake of going back to the scene of the crime.

He is identified and tracked by Javier Bardem’s character, a psychopathic killer named Anton Chigur, a name that will now be classed with ruthless revenge like Keyser Soze of the film The Usual Suspects. He kills everyone in his path, sometimes with a pneumatic pin attached to an air canister, other times with a silenced rifle. He cannot be reasoned with and will kill you with the toss of a coin. Bardem quite rightly won an academy award for a villain that cannot be stopped.

The trail of mayhem is followed by a Tommy Lee Jones as a West Texas county sheriff near the end of career. He is overwhelmed by the ferocious violence he sees. At the end, he seems to be the only person to survive and quite reasonably retires.

At the end, the bad guy injures his arm in a car accident and flees the scene. He is still on the loose.

It captures a time and place of 1980’s West Texas. That’s what Coen films do. They capture and present a time and place where unusual characters act out their stories. It was true of Raising Arizona, Fargo and O’ Brother Where Art Thou. Despite their dark moments there was some humor in them. No Country For Old Men is not my favorite Coen Brothers film. It may be a good film, but I have no desire to see it again.

Copyright 2008 DJ Cline All rights reserved.

Posted by dj in Movies, Reviews [913 Views]