The villain is Javier Bardem, looking like a cross between Andre the Giant and Ringo Starr. His weapon is a giant air gun attached to a tank of compressed oxygen. He’s the grim reaper personified in this, the Coen brothers’ best film since Fargo .
Based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, it’s vintage Coens, with equal doses of black comedy and grim violence. Josh Brolin, in a revelation of a performance, plays the Texas man who stumbles upon a suitcase of drug money, and Bardem is the stone-cold killer sent to retrieve it. The chase is on.
But the story certainly doesn’t behave like a conventional western (it’s set in 1980) and the county sheriff assigned to the case (Tommy Lee Jones) isn’t your typical gung-ho movie sheriff that saves the day. What if the Coens made an action film? This is it.
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