No Country For Anyone Wants To Feel Satisfied!

Rating: 2/10 (24 January 2008)

Great cinematography, great acting, great build up of tension & suspense and then......nothing, absolutely nothing!! I'm a fan of most of the Coen brothers work and this was a film I had high hopes for but unfortunately I found it to be one of their worst! Don't be fooled by the reviewers who are proclaiming this movie carries some important philosophical 'message', the so called 'message' contained in this film should be nothing new to anyone who has any interest in books or cinema...or for that matter, life. Real life teaches the lesson far better than any overly contrived film can. If it didn't take itself so seriously (this movie thinks it's way more important than it actually is) and had just stopped trying to be so annoyingly 'profound' and concentrated on the plot then I would have enjoyed it so much more.
There is ¾ of a good movie here but the last ¼ of the film is spent practically preaching to the audience and that is unforgivable in my opinion after what has come prior to that.
NCFOM has left me bewildered at the critical acclaim it has received although there are a few professional reviewers who will at least stand up for themselves and call this movie for what it is, a potentially great movie let down by a poor closing act! If this has stuck as closely to the book as some suggest then I'd say it was a book that should never have been made into a film in the first place...at the very least it needed some tweaks to the narrative progression in the last ¼ and a totally new denouement. If I was to rate this movie without the final quarter I'd probably give it 10 stars but since I felt like I'd spent 2 hours in the cinema without any kind of worthwhile closure to the story I believe watching the movie was almost totally pointless. It's a bit like cruelly dangling a carrot in front a donkey only to get to your destination and not actually give the tired donkey the carrot.
Sadly the movie as a whole just doesn't work for me!