Reason to Fear an Air Gun: a Review of the Movie No Country for Old Men

The Brothers Coen have been making some of the best movies around for some time now. Not all of their movies are masterpieces, but even their bad ones are still a notch above most of the other drek that is in the theaters. For example, their movie "The Ladykillers" is hardly a great movie. It has lots and lots of problems when it is compared to other comedic movies that they did note-perfect (such as "Raising Arizona") but it is still remarkably entertaining. It is a movie that still had me laughing out loud several times.

The Coen brothers made their masterpiece, "Fargo," several years ago. They have also created numerious cult classics. They were the brains behind "Raising Arizona" which is one of the few movies myself and my best-friend Scott can agree on without question. They were the ones who created the cult classic "The Big Lebowski." They also did "O, Brother Where Art Thou?" which is a movie that you either love or you hate. I also greatly enjoyed their movie "Barton Fink" despite the fact that the movie makes little sense and will leave you scratching your head afterward.

Most of their best movies have this way of combining shocking and sudden violence with a mix of truly outrageous and memorable comedy. I have never seen their first big movie "Blood Simple" but I have now just seen the movie "No Country fof Old Men" and I hear that it must be close to that original movie. "Blood Simple" is a crime story that devolves into violence. "Fargo" is also a movie where horrific and bloody violence has a way of happening all around the strange and funny people of Minnesota who keep getting killed in what is supposed to be a very easy crime.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of "No Country for Old Men" and I just finished reading his masterpiece "Blood Meridian" (which is now going to be a movie directed by Ridley Scott) and I can tell you that McCarthy's love of violence seems evenly matched with the Coen brother's tendency to enjoy violence. McCarthy has a very dark view of the world. In his world, the bad guys do very, very bad things and then, often, get away with those things by the end of the book. In "Blood Meridian" he creates a towering hairless monster called The Judge. In "No Country for Old Men" he brings up Anton Chigurh.

The story is deceptively simple. A simple man who lives in a trailer park and is a Vietnam Vet is out hunting Elk when he stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong. Among the litter of dead bodies he finds one holding a satchel of money. The amount of money is about $2 mil. He decides to keep it. Anton Chigurh is the psychopathic killer who wants to get the money back. That, in a nutshell, is the entire plot. Just reading that, you might think you have seen this movie before, perhaps a hundred times. You would be wrong.

Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh. Chigurh is such a monster that his preferred weapon is a "cattlegun" which is an air-powered device used to scramble the brains of cattle before their throats are slit in a slaughter house. To use it against a human he has to get in very close, touch the business-end of the gun against the person's head and then depress the trigger, sending a probe several inches long into the brain of his victim only to have it retract back into the gun. It leaves no bullet behind. It is also a remarkable device for opening locks by smashing them right through the door and out the other side.

Chigurh's other weapon is a shotgun with what has to be one of the largest silencers on the end of it that I have ever seen in a movie. I have never seen anyone attempt to silence a pump-action shotgun, but Chigurh does in this movie. He goes about his business like some kind of Temrinator. He does not rest. He has a scene where he medicates himself. He tosses a coin in the air to determine the fate of one hapless store owner in the middle of the desert. He strangles another one and he barely breaks a sweat and has a look of ecstacy on his face as the man thrashes. This is one of the greatest movie monsters since Hannibal Lecter.

Josh Brolin is Llewellen Moss, the man who finds the money. Tommy Lee Jones shows up to play a character he could play in his sleep, that of the grizzled old lawman who wants to keep Moss alive. Jones, however, plays a character who no longer knows how to deal with the modern criminal. He has started to despair over the world and wonders if she should retire. Then again, if he does, what will he do then?

The performances in this movie will chill you. The screen is full of characters saying and doing things that will haunt you for days, or weeks, after you see it. Brolin is dazzling as Moss. Bardem deserves a nomination for his portrayal of Chigurh. Woody Harrelson is outstanding in a small roll as a bounty hunter named Carson Wells.

This movie does not hit a wrong note. You believe that these people are out there. You believe the world they live in. The things they do make a kind of sense within the world of the movie. The horrors are horrifying, the laughs are well-earned. The ending will leave you grasping at your chest with a strange kind of emptiness.

There is violence in the world. Sadly, the real world still manages to be more brutal than anything Chigurh can do on film. The Coen brothers seem to know this as does McCarthy. Just because they shine a light on that violence does not mean they advocate it.

This is, quite simply, one of the best movies of the year.