Joel and Ethan Coen harken back to their first film, Blood Simple, with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas murder tale. Josh Brolin, who played a different sort of greedily reckless character in American Gangster, is great as a hunter who finds a couple of million in cocaine money. But it’s Javier Bardem, as a sociopoathic killer-for-hire who dispatches his victims with a bolt gun, who you won’t forget. Bardem’s creepy demeanor and deep voice practically had me quaking in my seat. The two men play cat and dog across south Texas. It’s like a western with cars instead of horses (there’s a couple of those too, though), or like a film noir with a couple of less hard-boiled characters (Tommy Lee Jones’s as a sheriff and Kelly McDonald’s as the wife of Brolin’s character). The Coen brothers effectively use light and shadow, and a minimum of dialogue, to maintain the tension for at least 90 minutes. The last act is more philosophical, and may be a letdown for those expecting an explosive finale.
IMDB link
reviewed 11/13/07
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