Just perfect...

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Despite having such a great cast and director, the movie manages to disappoint with a story that is utterly predictable and offers not a single surprise. I would have hoped for the makers to try to hide even some of what was going to happen, but now it was just a story of a cousellor heading for a train wreck.

Despite the many negative reviews, I think 'The Counselor' is an excellent film overall and probably one of Ridley Scott's best films. Cormac McCarthy has written a highly poetic, literary, and philosophic screenplay that explores humanity's heart of darkness: drug trafficking (which relates to arms trafficking and human/sex trafficking), greed, vanity, extreme violence, social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, etc.Philosophically, the film is extremely dark, perhaps the darkest movie I have ever seen, reminiscent of '8MM,' 'Apocalypse Now,' and 'No Country for Old Men.' In this film, the most evil people prevail and the less evil people are hunted and devoured. The counselor's fiancée, Laura (Penelope Cruz), represents innocence, virtue, and Christian faith and yet she ends up getting abducted, decapitated, raped, and discarded in a landfill. Then the counselor (Michael Fassbender) receives a DVD snuff film starring his fiancée.In contrast, Malkina (Cameron Diaz) represents the strong, ruthless, merciless, manipulative, Darwinian predator. She has cheetah-print tattoos on her back and two pet cheetahs. In her dialogues with Laura and the Catholic priest, she taunts her prey. Even though she sets into motion a plan to steal a Mexican drug cartel's shipment of cocaine, which fails, she evades their attention and ends up prospering. In the end, she celebrates her success and concludes the following:"The hunter has grace, beauty, and purity of heart to be found nowhere else. You can make no distinction between what they are and what they do. And what they do is kill. We, of course, are another matter. It is our faintness of heart that has driven us to the edge of ruin. Perhaps you won't agree, but nothing is crueler than a coward. And the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining."In other words, we humans should cease with our "faintness of heart" and cowardice (e.g. morality and compassion) and embrace social Darwinism and survival of the fittest. The strong should dominate and prey on the weak (e.g. the innocent, virtuous, and faithful). They should embrace their status as predators. After all, in Malkina's view, if you do not embrace social Darwinism, you will just end up being slaughtered by someone who does embrace that worldview and acts effectively. In that sense, for those who are weak-willed or weak- stomached, the "slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining."Overall, Malkina is a narcissistic, Machiavellian sociopath or psychopath and thus embodies the "Dark Triad" traits. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and other leading Nazis also demonstrated these Dark Triad traits, and they often appealed to social Darwinism when trying to justify their war-mongering and their Final Solution: the systematic extermination of 11 million Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, etc.However, one should never forget that Hitler and many other leading Nazis came to a bad end (e.g. suicide or the death penalty) and that the Nazis absolutely failed to achieve their ultimate objectives: defeat communism, conquer the entire continent of Europe (including Britain), and create a thousand-year Reich (German empire). In the long term, the Nazis sabotaged and destroyed themselves. Similarly, quite often, Machiavellian sociopaths or psychopaths like Malkina (or the high-level cartel members) end up destroying themselves or being destroyed (i.e. murdered). Arguably, this shows that extreme social Darwinism, sociopathy, and psychopathy are unsustainable, counterproductive, and self-defeating in the long term. Contrary to the film, evil or at least evil individuals do not prevail in the long term. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."In conclusion, I consider 'The Counselor' an excellent, literary, philosophic film with very dark themes. If you are seriously depressed or having mental health issues, I strongly recommend that you avoid this film. It can be difficult to digest even if you are a mature, mentally sound adult. Figuratively, it punches you in the gut. As Westray (Brad Pitt) says, "I've pretty much seen it all, Counselor, and it's all s***."

In Mexico, lawyer-man decides to dabble in the drug trade, and is strongly advised not to, by the two men who are his connections to the drug trade. Some stuff subsequently happens involving drugs, but it is damned near impossible to figure out any connection to lawyer-man's two drug connections, and nothing whatsoever is ever revealed about what lawyer-man did for them. Lawyer-man visits character played by Rosie Perez, in prison. She tells him that her kid is in jail, for speeding. The scene cuts quickly to a motorcyclist riding very fast along a desolate road, so we can infer that this is her son. A truck hauling septic waste pulls into a small lot. A man steps out and then removes an electronic immobilizer from the back of the cab, which he gives to another man in exchange for cash. This man meets up with the young man who rides the fast bike and delivers the device to him. They are watched by another man and woman in a car some distance away. Via cell phone, the man watching talks to a woman who we soon learn is the girlfriend of lawyer-man's #1 drug contact. The young man who rides the fast motorcycle is soon killed, and the device is taken. The truck is subsequently taken, from the yard at the small septic company's facility. Out on the highway in the middle of nowhere, they are pulled over by two phony policeman. After a bloody shootout, the sole survivor, one of the phony policeman, is now in possession of the septic truck. Both of lawyer-man's drug contacts inform him that he is in serious trouble, but he hasn't a clue why, and neither do we, because we have not been told a single thing about exactly what his involvement with the drug people was. We literally have no clue. Lawyer-man's #1 drug contact (the one with the girlfriend) is killed. The other one escapes, via airport jet. Lawyer-man panics, calls his fiancée and gives her instructions where to meet him. She gets taken at the airport. Lawyer-man's surviving drug contact arrives in Heathrow, goes to hotel, and at the desk has an apparently chance encounter with a strange woman. This woman later meets with the girlfriend of lawyer-man's #1 drug connection, and hands over, in exchange for an envelope filled with cash, a piece of paper with a password. On the street, lawyer-man's #2 drug contact is quickly killed by joggers who take his briefcase and deliver it to the girlfriend of #1, waiting in a car. She opens it, inserts a thumb drive into the small laptop computer, logs in, and up pop a couple windows for banks in the Caribbean. Lawyer-man lays on the floor of some grungy apartment somewhere and is awakened by a knock at the door. He opens the door and finds a small boy who is delivering an envelope. He opens the envelope and finds a DVD, then gets sick and drops it on the floor, without watching it, and sobs. His fiancee's body is then shown being dropped by a bulldozer into a large landfill / garbage dump, and buried under a large amount of garbage. Too bad we never learned exactly what lawyer-man had done to have deserved all this. Apparently, the screen-writer felt that it was sufficient for the viewer to know that lawyer-man did some unethical/illegal lawyering for some bad people who stole from some other bad people and who were in turn robbed by one of their own. But even this much was difficult to figure out, and there were a great many obvious questions that were never answered. This movie is not worth watching. Even if it were condensed to where you only had to spend five minutes watching it, it still wouldn't be worth the time to watch it.

One of the most underrated films of 2013. A film with a subtext about the acute world problem. If you look at the film superficially, then everything is just a story similar to the punched films of Gaia Richey, but the lack of voice-over, explaining the audience in the films of Gaia and so not an intricate story. Can make you look at the film under a different "angle," you start to peer at the film, search, then what is invested in it. Although the film looks slightly in what is not finished, it probably happened because of the tragedy in the family of Ridley Scott. This does not cancel out the pros of the picture. If we consider the film as a thriller, then it is necessary to evaluate very relevant musical inserts, forcing the atmosphere "the atmosphere of the approaching train", the excellent game of Javier Bardem and not the bad game of other actors. I regard this film as social in which my attention was drawn to the problem of the value of life in the countries in which people are forced to survive, due to the connivance of the government, and these countries are exploited by the governments of the more developed states, ultimately militants and criminals from less developed countries become a problem Countries "exploiters". In the scene of choosing a stone, the adviser is told about finding faults in the stones, which is the essence of the jewelry business, and about the desire to come into contact with the fate of the stone of the person who chose it. The further actions of the adviser and are shortcomings in the business, in which he falls due to greed and carelessness, he is the drawback that will lead him and all whose people he will drag along with himself to the tragic end. The adviser and his lover are the only living in the center of a monolithic stone system. Do not make a counselor a good deed for your client, thereby creating a flaw in a non-clean deal, things could have been different, but there would be an outcome to others. This question leaves an open conversation at the end of the adviser's film with the head of the cartel, and an illustration of a corpse in a barrel sent Together with drugs. After all, criminals living in the country on the brink of survival, where the government has drug cartels and corruption is flourishing, where they shoot and then look at whom they shot, they think quite differently ...