Very watchable but lacking originality.

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2012)

A good film, well produced and some decent performances but hardly original.
Here we have an everyday man stumbling upon stolen loot and a massacre scene in the desert. Sound familiar? Yep it was an identical premise (and scene) to the plot for The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Only in the GB&U it was the "tip off" of where loot was hidden. Similar theme in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Shallow Grave and many others.
Back to NCFOM and the main protagonist who takes the law into his own hands also has many parallels with too many other film characters to mention - but you could toss in the likes of D-Fens in Falling Down, Butch and Sundance, etc etc.
Enter the psycho who just kills everyone for the hell of it. Or as the bounty hunter Woody Harrelson says "he'll kill you for the inconvenience" Yep we've seen all these types before also - Arnie, Rambo, Mr Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, etc etc...
Then comes the straight Sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) who doesn't use a gun if he can help it - yep we've seen this type before too - see High Noon, Shane, etc etc.
So the characters are fairly stereotypical and the plot not the freshest to ever grace the screens. But there is an added dimension, the psycho is in fact haunting the Sheriff and in fact will haunt him forever - this is fairly well done but it is pretty odd. Why? Well the sheriff isn't the main protagonist in this film, he only really becomes "part" of it in the last third, by that time most will not really care about him. It would have been better and made more sense had the Psycho haunted the couple forever.
Cinematography is excellent, the direction pretty good but on the whole this is just a re-hash of several films with the Coen stamp over it.
There are a few very stupid moments. Like Josh Brolin waiting for the psycho to come into his hotel room. Josh sits on the bed right in front of the door. Surely the sensible thing would have been to lie down behind the bed or move over to the side of the room to reduce the risk of being caught by the bulletfire. Also in another later scene, the way Josh Brolin enters Mexico pretending to Border Patrol he is a drunk was silly. Only outdone on the silliness scale by him re-entering America with few clothes on having escaped from hospital. He tells the Border Patrol guard he's a Vietnam vet but shows no ID yet he's gets the all clear to enter. Very silly indeed but I am willing to retract these remarks and apologise to the Coens if in fact such occurrences do happen on the USA/Mexican Border.
Yet despite all the flaws this movie does work. It does create tensions and most viewers will get caught up in the cat and mouse games.
There are times when the dialogue is a bit slow and with no soundtrack sometimes it seems an age to get through a sequence especially when it is sometimes difficult to follow because the accents are so thick.
In summary,NCFOM is a bit overrated but is certainly good, watchable cinema and though the ending may leave some feeling cheated it is at least a bit different unlike the rest of the film which seems very similar to a lot of action films based on greed and lawlessness.