dumbest. movie. ever.

Rating: 1/10 (12 April 2008)

No Country for Old Men is a pretentious, over-the-top slasher film for the art house crowd. Think Friday the Thirteenth meets Ingmar Bergmen.
Without giving anything away, the movie's plot can be summarized as follows: Guy finds money. Bad guy chases guy (killing pretty much everything in his path). Other people show up for no particular reason, and add nothing to the plot (other then to often be victims of the bad guy). Sheriff sips coffee and murmurs silly coffee house philosophy. The end.
Of course, it's all supposed to be quite artsy. Maybe the bad guy's a murdering psychopath. Maybe he's Fate. Maybe he's death incarnate. Or maybe he's just Freddy Kruger with a bolt gun and a great big silenced rifle. It doesn't really matter because the movie doesn't actually make anything of any of this. Fans of the film say it's "mirroring the randomness of life" or "it's a morality play" or "it shows how the characters' fates are intertwined" (all of which can be said about Spongebob Squarepants as well). But what's it all add up to? Tommie Lee Jones mumbles about this in the end, but his monologue feels tacked on and superfluous, like a Jerry Springer lesson at the end of one of his shows.
The film's also been lauded for having great cinematography and shot selection  which it does. But this only highlights the emptiness of it all, like a high-gloss paint job on my '72 Pacer. Want to see a guy get strangled in real time from an artsy overhead angle? It's in there. Want to see compound fractures, decomposing bodies, brain splattering head shots, and buckets of blood? It's got that too  but again, it doesn't add to our understanding of the plot or the characters.
Don't listen to the hype.