Massively Overrated

Rating: 6/10 (5 May 2008)

Let me start with the good. The movie is beautifully shot, creates an authentic feel for Texas, is well acted, offers good suspense, and has a truly scary villain. What starts out good goes severely downhill to a really unsatisfying ending, however.
I was shocked but fine with Brolin being taken out (from an unexpected direction), and it lent realism. I also understand Tommy Lee Jones wanting to give up. However, to let the villain off the hook after he does the huge dirt he does, was a total crock. It wasn't just Tommy Lee Jones who would be after this villain. He kills a deputy at the very start of the movie. Texas law enforcement does not look too kindly on that sort of behavior. I'm also getting tired of the constant justification of murder in movies by a 'murderer's code'. We have enough lack of justice in real life. What people pay to see is the bad guy eating his sanctimonious trumped-up morality at the end. So the direction this movie took was bad morality, bad logic and bad entertainment all wrapped into one.
These movies feed a curiosity for violence, and of course I watched the movie knowing what I was in for. To build up hatred for a villain, and doubt in the hero, Tommy Lee Jones, and then show the hero to be weak, and the villain to go scot free is pointless. Is the final car crash supposed to be god playing with him? Why isn't he killed? Why don't two kids carjack him and kill him on the spot? That would have fed into the title, the villain being done by someone even younger than him. As I said, we know real life already, and even in real life, killers like this guy don't go scot free. This villain killed 20 people over a week, and no one is capable of catching up to his randomness? Perhaps things are that bad in TX, but I doubt it. Pretty stretchy on the believability.
They also don't show a couple of key murders, including one that's fairly critical at the end, and adds to the chaotic finish. Harrelson's disposable character makes zero sense. He's sent after the villain because he's a supposed pro, and then just gets caught and offed so easily? Harrelson had to be given something to showcase his toughness, and there was nothing. The villain then goes into his employers office and kills him for sending Harrelson. Talk about clichéd.
The philosophical conversations about murder and death and honor were done FAR better in Apocalypse Now. I cant believe this movie received ANY Oscars, except maybe for cinematography. Ultimately a pretentious film with a disturbing subtext about powerlessness that is addressed but not fully developed.
Yes, I grasp films that break the mold in which the villain gets away, but in this film it is a pretentious choice. Brolin's character was doing a great job of fending off the villain and his childish arrogance, but then Brolin got caught from a different direction. Doesn't serve the previous character development, but OK, The villain then goes after Brolin's wife later because of his psycho 'code', with what happens not shown, but implied. This was a moment for Tommy Lee Jones (or anyone) to show up and finish him, including her. I know this would have been a predictable ending, but the film was more or less a typical mob money chase movie, not a particularly original premise.
The Cohn brothers are renowned for a style, and it's turning into a set of gimmicky choices about breaking clichés in ways that are more annoying than effective and original. When you make a movie far less entertaining by deconstructing a cliché in a way already done, you aren't being original, you are being a pretentious bad director. I understand Tommy Lee Jones abdication at the end, but what is the point of all the conversations about how his granddad had it tough as well, or that evil is eternal? He just decides to sit it out? He doesn't even speak on the topic in a manner that you can tell he's deciding to sit it out. VERY sloppy, indifferent, inadequate rendering of the material in my eyes.
Overrated for making a violent aggressive movie with a confused whimper of an ending, and calling it the 'real world' doesn't cut it. Even if this is the way the book was written, the finale, or lack thereof, was directed in a way that was chaotic, indifferent to the audience, and therefore pretentious.