Anton Chigurh is one of the greatest evils in cinema - ever

Rating: 9/10 (11 February 2017)

The film is set in rural West Texas, with the main character a welder and hunter named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) discovers the remains of several drug runners who have managed to kill each other in an exchange gone violently wrong. Rather than report the discovery to the sheriff Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), He decides to simply to pocket the 2 million dollars for himself. The result of that decision puts a psychopathic killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), on his trail by the drug cartel. This killer is a dispassionate murderer of nearly every rival, bystander and even his employer in his pursuit of Moss. As Moss desperately attempts to keep one step ahead, the blood from this hunt begins to flow behind him with relentlessly growing intensity as Chigurh closes in. Meanwhile, the laconic Sheriff Ed Tom Bell blithely oversees the investigation even as he struggles to face the sheer enormity of the crimes he is attempting to thwart. This is a Coen brothers' team of direction and production that is beautifully terse and very intense. The film provides "edge of your seat" and these quickly paced action scenes are tightly constructed and presented like a Hitchcock film with its almost morbid silence in the showing of the act of murder. Any lesser movie would seemingly dissolve into cat and mouse territory, by the middle of the film, but here there are more shoot outs and standoffs galore and the viewer begs to anticipate what is happening next, but cannot. Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this bleak but mesmerizing country, as Tommy Lee Jones shows up as a soon to be retired sheriff, and commands the screen by pumping the drama with morality and reality versus the mayhem preceding him. It is a very unique film that begs watching again and again.