Good, as far as it goes... No ending.

Rating: 6/10 (14 October 2008)

I liked "Fargo", liked this title, and am very familiar with west Texas. I also liked the the beginning, middle, and the acting and directing was excellent to a point. The point was the Act 3 ending.
I have to agree with the reviewers who are disappointed with this movie, and awards given to movies with poor endings. I went back and had to review the last scenes to see if I missed something on the DVD, but unfortunately I hadn't missed anything significant in this movie. There was no real ending, no reasoning that tied the story together except a string of murder and gore. Almost any writer could create a multitude of better endings, but that didn't happen.
Basically, if you can imagine "Fargo" (with or without snow) with Tommy Lee Jones playing a male version of "Margie" who is ready to retire, and retires at the end of the movie after driving right by the kidnappers' "safe house" on Moose Lake, never seeing the "burnt ember Cierra", you have a very similar plot. How satisfying is that?
It is disappointing that people can crank out stories with poor, confusing, truncated endings and pretend they are something great. It is far too great a "cheat", and I have to agree that politics seems to drive a lot of awards for poor writing, because it seems to be common now.
If you remember the 80/20 rule, where the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the effort, there is a lot of effort missing on this one.