hugely disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (29 January 2008)

I deliberately avoided reading any reviews or seeing any clips of this film before seeing it, thinking that it would be nice to come to it completely fresh. I generally like a lot of what the Coen brothers do - Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo in particular. But I hated Miller's Crossing, and that should have warned me.
No Country got off to a bad start, in that the initial voice-over was almost completely incomprehensible to me. OK, I'm English, and maybe I find a deep Texan drawl as hard to understand as someone from Texas might find Glaswegian, but this just put me in a bad mood. If you've got a character who's got to impart some information, then please get him to open his damn mouth while he talks. Through the whole movie, people talked to each other in this glutinous mutter, and I just sat there rolling my eyes. CAN'T HEAR YOU! Fargo had people talking "funny", but at least you could understand what they were saying. So yes, maybe I missed some vital information.
As for the movie as a whole, well, there were good things - the landscapes, the photography, some neat protagonists, some good tense situations. I liked the lack of music, and the slow pace. But at the end of it all, it all added up to very little. A bunch of americana clichés - motel room, garage-owner, people driving around in cars, mute banal violence, sweet white-trash wife in a trailer, yeah yeah, seen it all before. It all started to feel like a mix and match style exercise.
I don't mind a bit existential alienation - Two Lane Blacktop and most of the films of Tarkovsky are among my personal favourites. But there was something pointless about this film. Terminator-style remorseless killer chases opportunist around, and lots of people die. Um. Old cop sees lots of dead people and gets a bit depressed, but is too lazy or stupid or filled with ennui to do much about it. Bad people wander out of the picture. The End.
Actually, the end was simply dreadful. I don't mind a sudden, strange, open ending. If the film ends like that, and the audience rocks back in their seats and you hear a massed intake of breath - well, that's one thing. But with the end of this movie I could sense a collective thought... "Is that IT?!"