Brutal, Tense and Violently Poetic.

Rating: Null/10 (26 January 2008)

Plot:
Texas, 1980. Hunting in the desert, Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) comes across the wreckage of a drug deal gone wrong and takes the cash  without counting on the man sent after him, an implacable killer (Bardem) intent on recovering the loot at any cost.
My Review:
The Coens have been off their game, they have been off their rocker with a short number of okay flicks. This time, the genre they tackle changes format completely. The Coens have rediscovered their mojo; with added humanity and Viagra.
A from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's violent neo-Western, No Country For Old Men encompasses blood, guts, gun galore, sharply and tense woven plot with a lusciously written script. It's got Blood and lots of Balls, sense of death lurking in the barren dry Texan landscape that has some flamboyant cinematography. And being a knotted tale of crime innately wrapped in circumstantial regards.
Surprisingly foremost is how the film remains both recognisably to McCarthy's allegory, all the while being soaked in oil-black humour. With the entire jazzy corollary that the Coen's use at their detriment, with witty deadpan comebacks. "If I don't come back, tell my mother I love her," Josh Brolin's anti-hero Llewellyn Moss tells his wary discerning wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) before he faces hell. "Your mother's dead," she retorts. "Then I'll tell her myself," he sighs.
Sweltering corpses cook in the thirty-plus degree desert sun, even a dead dog, and a trail of blood, with the same splinter of the recent ' The Assassination of Jess James by the coward Robert Ford' indomitable likeness, splattered like ink along the parched ground, leads Moss to a case containing two million dollars. He takes to the money and runs. We consequentially start eyeing the tremulous determination of Moss, a local hunter who happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone badly wrong. The plot is triple-headed, with the narrative shifting focus whenever one of the leads seems to be taking centre stage, some more than others.
The clean-up guy is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who is totally underestimated throughout. A killer with the implacable dedication and blend of a Cylon from 'Battlestar Galactica' and Terminator; with a haircut to match, with a psychopathic sense of hypocrisy, irony and striking intelligence. Even Carter Burwell's score is defined by its candid  made up only of groans and eerie whistles. Course with that being said, the score only builds up at the roll of the credits. Bardem's is the role with a unbelievable amount of possibilities  a stone-cold killer obsessed, leaving to fate and chance to decide the lives of the ones he holds to the flip of a random toss of a quarter. He is blank force made breathtakingly plausible.
A startling chase set of events leads to shootings shot to perfect, brutal and tense graphical scenes that really make that +18 or R rating stand out in a dry soaked red. Always two steps behind is the old man of the tale, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a lawman up for retirement, facing an evil that he can no longer decode.
It is true to the book, even when the end is like a downplay and ambiguous laden message instead of a crescendo-ed glorified good guy v.s bad guy.
Verdict:
Colourfully and visually beguiling; as tense, sharp and brutal as some Western depictions. One of the best of 2007. 9/10. Watch for the coin toss scene with Bardem and a shopkeeper.