I’m not sure I got as much out of this as some, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more gripped from start to finish than I was during pretty much any given movie of the past year (okay, maybe 30 Days just pips it). The chase here is extraordinarily visceral, delivering bucketloads of the kind of jumpy shock most movies can lay claim to just a handful of with just about every gunshot and jolt having an impact. I hope that if this movie does get the Oscar nominations everyone’s buzzing about, it’s included in the sound categories too.

I guess I’ve got to be honest and say if there’s a reason I’m left a little empty by the movie, it’s ‘cos it lacks two things which, it you look at my faves, are kind of important to me: heart and music. So it’s not the movie’s fault at all as these two absences are highly deliberate. But it’s very rare a movie without one or both those things can do a thing for me – whereas this one did plenty – so don’t be discouraged by my 4-star rating. Though this movie comes close to that box of movies last year that were technically perfect but delivered nothing “beyond” for me, it never quite gets in.

Javier Bardem is one of the creepiest killers ever to walk the screen and his modus operandi is truly the stuff of nightmares (it’s when you see him open doors with it that makes it even worse). There’s plenty here to bring me back for a second viewing, when I’m sure it might grow on me just as Fargo (which I didn’t get at all on the first view) did. Right now, I do think calling it the Coens’ “best ever!” is a bit of a stretch – I mean, come on, they had about a decade long string of instant modern classics up to Fargo – but it is eons above Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty.

Tags: chase, drugs, Mexico, money, murder, Texas

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.