The Counselor - Malkina banging my car
The Counselor is a dialogue-heavy, stylized, ultraviolent crime movie that is both a thriller and a morality play.
Cameron Diaz plays Malkina, who lives with Reiner, an affably shady businessman played by Javier Bardem. Malkina is Reiner’s girlfriend, the crown-jewel accessory of his increasingly lavish lifestyle. Malkina has a gold canine tooth and cheetah-spot tattoos running down her back. She keeps two actual cheetahs as pets. The first time we see her she’s watching them hunt a rabbit. When they catch the rabbit she looks disappointed that she can’t eat it herself. She’s the movie’s apex predator; she’s always telling people she’s hungry because circumstances require her to wait until the third act to feed.
Plot[]
Malkina gains knowledge of the deal through her access to Reiner and by conveniently overhearing various intercoms in Reiner's home. Reiner describes an execution device called "the bolito" which gradually strangles and decapitates the victim. Reiner also tells the Counselor how disturbed and oddly aroused he was from an incident where he witnessed Malkina masturbate with his Ferrari California's windshield.
The Counselor visits a client, a prison inmate named Ruth who is on trial for murder. Ruth's son is a biker and a valued drug cartel member known as "the Green Hornet", recently arrested for speeding. The Counselor agrees to bail him out of jail. Malkina senses an opportunity to undermine the Counselor's upcoming deal and to profit for herself. She employs "the Wireman" to steal the drugs. He decapitates the biker, Ruth's recently released son, with a wire stretched across the highway. Then the Wireman steals the truck containing the cocaine. Learning of the theft, Westray meets with the Counselor to notify him that the biker is dead and the cocaine stolen, bleakly intoning the Counselor's culpability.
Malkina's failed effort to steal the drugs does not deter her. She tracks Westray to London, where she hires a blonde woman to seduce him and steal his bank codes. She then has accomplices steal Westray's laptop, and he is killed with the "bolito" device that Reiner had previously described. Malkina then meets her banker at a restaurant, coolly explaining how she wants her profits and accounts to be handled.
Reception[]
- Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, saying "director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy have fashioned a sexy, sometimes shockingly violent, literate and richly textured tale of the Shakespearean consequences of one man's irrevocable act of avarice" and called it "a bloody great time.
- Mark Kermode listed it as number two on his Ten Worst Films of 2013.
- Danny Leigh of the BBC programme Film 2013 praised the film, saying that "the real star is the script. What this film really is is a Cormac McCarthy audiobook with visuals by Ridley Scott. It's black as night, engrossing and masterful." He also acclaimed the performances, particularly Diaz's, and said, with regard to the negative reviews, "Movie history is littered with films that we all sneered at and we all laughed at and we all thought were terrible and the critics hated them and no-one went to see them, and then 40 years later they fetch up on programmes like this with everyone saying 'what a masterpiece!'"
Accolades[]
- Cameron Diaz was nominated for "Best WTF Moment" at the 2014 MTV Movie Awards Award.