No Country for Old Men

Let me save you some time, if you are the type to read or think before you choose to see a movie. (If more people were, we might have 4,000 fewer "I hated it" reviews posted on Netflix.) No Country for Old Men is a cat-and-mouse thriller. (It is suspenseful not cheerful.) A vicious killer hunts down everyone in the wake of the money cache he seeks to recover. (Another force of nature, the hurricane, has a calm eye but for the most part it leaves behind only destruction.) It does not have a tidy crime-does-not-pay ending. (Which is scarier: What a villain does during a movie or what he will keep doing if he gets away?) The movie's premise is how Darwinian modern-day crime has become -- it's no territory for old-school or simply old men anymore. (It is a tragedy that is meant to stick with you and make you think.) Feeling comfortable or satisfied afterwards is not in the cards. So forget everything Disney and Star Wars has blanched into your brain. See this movie for what it is and let it bleach your mind like the Arizona sun does the desert. A little stark contrast -- like the spartan landscape of the desert -- can help focus the soul on what's important. No Country for Old Men is an essay of sorts on the barren landscape of the Arizona desert, which is a metaphor for the deepening cruelty of the modern-day criminal. Tommy Lee Jones narrates about the proud long line of lawmen from which he has descended and now serves -- but the present-day criminal is not his pappy's thief or thug. There was a time, he says, when lawmen didn't carry guns to do their job; now they encounter guns all the time -- and automatic weapons to boot. Border-crossing drug runners are often armed to the teeth -- as evidenced in one deadly tableau found just over an isolated ridge. A local never-say-die hunter (Josh Brolin) finds the crime scene first and scouts out the terrain; he tracks down the body of the money man and brings a suitcase crammed with drug money back to his trailer home. That night, the drug lords find the site of their dead mules. Unfortunately for them, however, and the trail of bodies that will follow in his wake, a highly proficient hitman named Anton Chigurh has been dispatched to "make things right" following the failed drug transport. Chigurh is relentless in his pursuit of the hunter and any and all acquaintances, creative in his lethality, and vicious in his will to utterly destroy anyone who has so much as seen him. That's all I will say about that. As the Oscars' Best Picture of the Year, yes, you have to see this movie to believe it. (Disney addicts, keep walking -- nothing to see here.) 5 stars.