Failed On the Premises

Rating: 3/10 (17 October 2016)

Not since the Big Sleep has a plot line taken more shots. Film is about character, and character is about action. The final scene is when Ed Bell's wife is blandly looking over the table at him, brings down the curtain. He is all out of action. The action figures in the story,(plot integrity is unessential) have played their hands, and there is no where to go; like Steinbeck's case for "westering", after the men came to the edge and ran out of land, or Sam the Lion in The Last Picture Show talking about the land, or like the hired killer in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, when the victim offers to pay him "more" than the man who hired him. The killer takes the money and kills the man anyway because he always "finishes the job." There are long quiet spaces punctuated by gunfire, Sergio Leone-like. The characters are a mix of gods and demigods. The more mortal you are the more tenuous your place. I would have had Carla Jean shoot Chigurh, just for laughs. Not enough laughs in this picture for all the process, tent poles and hiding the bag of money, and the transponders wrapped in a wad of one dollar bills? Remember process in Night and Fog? That had more laughs.