creepy crawling

Rating: 8/10 (17 April 2008)

The most central conceit of this movie - and it's a brilliant one - is its slowness. Life in Texas is slow, so this movie is slow, this heist is slow - even the psychopaths are slow. Someone has been watching "Young Mr. Lincoln"! Only here the point is a rising nervous tension that is allowed an outlet, if not a release, as it is punctuated with random and unpredictable bursts of violence. Why are people so het up about Josh Brolin's anticlimactic fate? This ain't Sergio Leone - a conventional showdown would be as disruptively wrong as the third act of "Juno". Personally, it's Tommy Lee Jones who loses me - what's he on about? But that's more than balanced out elsewhere - by Javier Bardem, of course, and by the uncanny and eerily seedy production design, evoking a 1980 where an irreversible decay has already laid its killing roots.