Unconventional but highly effective thriller

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2010)

This movie took a while to really get into, but once I did I was pretty overwhelmed. It isn't a classic fight between the good and the bad, it's more like a brilliant cat-and-mouse game between the unlikeable and the even more unlikeable. I felt bad for Llewellyn Moss, who had no idea about how far over his head he was, but he's mostly the hero because of the contrast with Anton Chigurh. Chigurh is the unstoppable evil, which is mainly apparent in the gas station scene, in which he decides the clerk's fate in a coin toss. It's so random, it has nothing to do with the main plot, but he wants to kill him because he can. That's the frightening thing about Chigurh, he does bad things for no reason. It's a brilliant character, and his cold-blooded antics give the movie a breakneck pace. The pseudo-intellectual ending scene is an anti-climax, but that's pretty much the only criticism I can give.