This is the latest movie from the Coen brothers and their best received since Fargo. In fact, this movie just won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2007.
If taken at face value, this movie is not very impressive. It is basically a simple crime tale with the classic character archetypes of the cop, the killer, and the man caught in the middle. What makes the movie so powerful is how it presents and explores its themes of aging, modernization, and self-reliance.
At the beginning of the movie Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) is out hunting game in the middle of nowhere. He stumbles upon a massacre, a drug deal gone terribly wrong. He only finds one man alive, but he is obviously not long for this world either. Moss also finds a bag full of two million dollars. When he decides to take the money, he sets off the events for the rest of the movie.
Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) is the man that caused all the deaths. He returns to the scene of the crime and finds out the money is gone. Psychopath that he is, he must not only find the money, he must also kill the man who took it. Moss decides to run away with the money; he knows whoever it belongs to will want it back and will kill him if they find him. The chase begins.
Tommy Lee Jones plays the Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. He is investigating the massacre as well as a number of mysterious deaths caused by Chigurh. He quickly figures out that Moss took the money and is on the run from the serial killer. Thus, he joins the chase as well.
Moss manages to evade his pursuer for a while and keep the money hidden. He uses some ingenious lo-fi tricks to do this. His cleverness is what endears him to the audience more than any of his moral choices do. As Anton pursues him and gets closer and closer, the bodies begin to pile up. It gets so bad that the people who hired him hire another hit man (played by Woody Harrelson) to bring him in.
Article comments
1 - Billy
I found this review interesting, I myself did not care for the basics of this movie as it was slow and boring at times, but I like how the reviews here are in detail and really explain the main characters.
2 - bliffle
I didn't enjoy the movie. Too slow, and a very empty feeling. The scenes seemed to be too sparsely populated and very cramped. I suspect that this is a matter of the cheap way that modern movies are made, with few bit players and sets that are artificially fore-shortened to save studio space.