Fun if you don't expect anything

Rating: 2/10 (18 March 2008)

First, as someone pointed out in another review, if you want to see a really good movie on the nature of drug violence, good, evil and religious symbolism see "La Vírgen de los Sicarios." (Our Lady of the Assassins) A much, much better movie than NCFOM.
I'm giving it 2 stars because it entertained me by its skillful camera work and sense of action and location. It held my interest, but believe me, the one star reviews here are spot on. It is as bad as they say. To me it was like a piece of junk sculpture where a whole is created out of a collection of disparate but well crafted parts welded together with no continuity or internal logic. For me there was a weird fascination in its badness, but I don't expect anybody else to have the same reaction. The plot doesn't make sense, the characters don't make sense, and we don't care about them. And don't give me any of this nonsense about the meaning of evil or the decay of civilization. All that puffy literary crap is just made up. It reminded me of "Last Year at Marianbad," a lot of sound & fury signifying nothing.
People have been trying to make sense out of the plot, but I think the plot was intentionally nonsensical. Film is not reality and for some films (For example the Dr. Phibes movies) a convention of unreality is sustainable and charming. But here the techniques of realism are used to subvert realism. Maybe the Brothers thought it would be like Duchamp's bicycle wheel, but it's not that good, or meaningful. Yes, we want a film that isn't predictable and doesn't necessarily follow the usual formulas of film noir, but with useless characters, characters who do totally illogical things, and action which isn't shown so we only have to guess at what happened and why and to whom, we are left only with an incoherent assemblage of cinamagraphic tricks.
You may enjoy this movie in a perverse way, as I did, but then maybe not.