Another good one from the Coen brothers

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 2008)

Major spoilers.
The Coens certainly seem to be building up a head of steam as they head into their sixth decade, and looking back through their filmography there's only one film that never really made the cut for me. They're still bang on form here, that's for sure, with a slow-burning crime thriller similar in concept to A Simple Plan, although here there is no sibling rivalry but one simple man against one complex hit-man and a lawman who comes to realise that he is long past his best and far out of his depth.
Anton Chigurh is one of those creations that linger in the memory long after the fine details of the film have begun to fade, and is played with unnerving understatement by Javier Bardem. You definitely wouldn't want to make fun of his hairdo, that's for sure. Like Tommy Lee Jones ageing sheriff, Chigurh chooses not to use a conventional weapon, killing most of his victims with a captive bolt pistol that propels a retractable bolt into the head or body of his victim, leaving a fatal wound but few clues as to the killer. In effect, Chigurh is the nearest you can get to a human ghost, killing only those who 'see' him in the course of his duties.
Chigurh is hired to retrieve the money from a drug deal gone wrong, and quickly learns that the money has been hijacked by Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a resourceful good ol' boy with a conscience that proves both to be his undoing and the only real weak spot in the film. Of course, had Moss not gone back to the scene of the drugs shootout there would have been no film or, at least, the Coen's would have had to negotiate a more tortuous path to enable both Chigurh and the Mexican gangsters also employed to find the money to track their quarry.
With virtually no musical score, the Coen's effectively use silence as an instrument of tension. Where most films would try to ratchet up the tension with music designed to influence the viewer's senses this one simply places a static camera in front of an armed man staring at a seedy hotel door and effortlessly has your nerves twanging. But then the whole film is quiet. Tommy Lee Jones'  who looks as if he has aged 20 years in the past five  ageing sheriff's fear of the forces he is up against and realisation of his inadequacies compared to the heritage which he is trying to live up to creep up on him almost without us or him - realising.
The film's conclusion is completely logical and wholly uncompromising in its callous disregard for the traditional happy ending. Everyone ends up damaged or dead  just like in real life  and there are no tidy solutions. There is even a blurring of what is real and what imagined when Ed Tom Bell enters the motel room in which the enterprising Moss was finally gunned down. In many films this deliberate decision to avoid and even frustrate the viewers' attempt to attach rational explanations to all that takes place on screen would prove to be irritating, but with this film the technique is strangely appropriate.