Where does one start with The Counsellor? Is it the director? Sir Ridley Scott? How about the cast which includes Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Cameron Diaz? Or does one spend some time pondering why Cameron Diaz would scrape her vagina up and down the windscreen of a Ferrari.
Seriously. You may think I’ve lost my mind. And while the mind losing may or may not have happened a number of years ago, Cameron Diaz and her vadge on windscreen certainly did happen. Climbing out of the Ferrari (where even Javier Bardem looks like hes wondering what the fuck is going on) she hikes up her skirt and straddles the outside windscreen. Anyway, its as erotic as it sounds, and like every other orgasm in the movie, its all over quite quickly. It’s a unique scene that you’re unlikely to see again or even find in the deepest and darkest parts of the internet. And it certainly left a mark. More so on the windscreen than anything else. Its a shame Bardem’s character didn’t turn on the wipers and squirt a bit of windscreen wash when she climbed back in.
To be fair to Bardem, he is rather watchable in The Counsellor pulling off a memorable performance, full of personality and presence. Cameron Diaz, besides her car fucking attempts, is also on decent form here and looks absolutely smouldering. The rest of the cast just dial the thing in, with Michael Fassbender only flexing his phenomenal acting muscles toward the end and Cruz not even breaking a sweat, but maintaining a likeability.
With a number of similar genre films under his belt and with arguably a dream casting, you’d expect alot more from Ridley Scott. It’d be interesting to see how much he actually directed here, because there is very little of his style on display and not once does it feel like a Scott film. Instead, it meanders around the place with a story that sees Fassbender’s character finding himself in all sorts of trouble with drug cartels after a substantial drug shipment goes missing. And while that might make for thrilling reading in a synopsis, on screen its nothing but convoluted and confusing nonsense where neither character nor story seems to know what the fuck is going on. In an attempt at trying to be clever, The Counsellor just ends up falling over itself time and time again with pointless scenes and about as much flow as a dried up river bed.
At times it does flourish with the small dollops of tension and you do make a connection with the characters maybe twice. Once with Fassbender and once with the underused Penélope Cruz. But even that is a struggle, because by the time those moments come around, you may have well missed them as you were looking at your watch wondering when it was all going to end.
The Counsellor is a huge misstep from the normally superb Scott and not even Cameron Diaz shagging a windscreen can save this meandering, confusing and pointless film.
