No Country for Old Men: Overrated

Welcome to the overrated movie review, where I take a movie that was given critical praise upon release, and explain why it’s overrated. Strap in and strap on.

I feel so accomplished. I got all my projects done, I caught up on some anime, watched Barton Fink for the first time ever (it was pretty good), and I saw No Country for Old Men (it wasn’t pretty good).


No Country for Old Men is one of those movies that I remember seeing trailers for, and also remember people really liking it, but after it had its 15 minutes of fame, it never really amounted to anything. It was parodied on The Simpsons once… so it had that going for it. But just out of curiosity, I gave the Wikipedia page a look, and I’m shocked to find out the ridiculous praise this movie got. It sits at a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 4/4 from Roger Ebert and an 8/10 rating on IMDB, while being nominated for 8 academy awards. That’s a lot of praise for a movie that I just thought was… OK… not terrible, even, just overly long and boring.

Taking place in 1980, Moss, a Vietnam veteran, is out hunting in the Texas desert when he comes across a failed drug deal. He finds a large box with about $2 million, and takes it home. Sometime later, doing the only nice thing he could possibly do, he takes water to one of the dying men, when he is attacked by mysterious men. On the run, Moss must both outrun and outsmart Chigurh, the madman who leaves destruction in his wake.

See, that narrative by itself isn’t a bad thing, but No Country just doesn’t know what to do with these characters, and as a result, the plot wavers between being exciting to dry, but engaging, to strange as fuck, then leaves us with an ending that’s so open ended, it’s hard not to feel like my time was wasted. But the biggest missed opportunity is not fully utilizing the characters it has at its disposal.
For instance, the film opens with Chigurh being arrested, then strangling an officer to make an escape, then using a bolt pistol to kill a bystander and steal their car, resulting in the creepiest smile to be put to screen. Chigurh is a creepy weirdo. Javier Bardem’s performance is what 100% sells the character, whose emotions range from none, to creepy, all knowing, “I am going to enjoy killing you” smirk.

Speaking of not fully utilizing characters, Moss is one of the most bland protagonists to be put to screen. Now, I’m not saying that all movies need perfectly defined arcs where characters learn a moral or change their attitude about something, but it would be nice if we were given some kind of information about who this guy is. We’re given little more introduction than the opening scene of a bad slasher movie: he’s a Texan/veteran who lives in a trailer park, he has a wife he loves I guess, and has just enough of a sense of right and wrong to bring a man water in the desert 9+ hours after he probably needs it, but not enough to not think that taking $2 million might be a bad idea. By the end of it, we know pretty much nothing about him, how being a veteran does anything for him other than act as a title, and so on.

And then there’s Tommy Lee Jones’s character, Sheriff Bell, whose purpose in the story is… to have Tommy Lee Jones’s name on the poster. Jones is fine in the roll, but the movie constantly wants us to feel like he’s a secondary protagonist, but he does so little that it’s hard to understand why he’s even here in the first place. His main purpose seems to be tracking down Moss, but has almost no leads, so he pretty much acts as an all knowing old man figure until the film’s climax.

Then there’s all the vague plot details in the story. Take Chigurh for example. Sure, he wants the money back, but why? Is he a crime boss? Is he related to one of the gunned down drug dealers? According to the Wikipedia page, he was “hired to retrieve the money” but who hired him? That fat man in the office building we see later? If so, who the fuck is that guy and why is he hiring people like Chigurh? Is he the boss? And so on. The film just doesn’t take its time to establish why each character does what, and as a result, the movie tends to feel all over the place.  These plot holes just keep popping up like parts of the script where straight up left out, which is odd considering it’s a 2 hour long movie.

But all that pales in comparison to the film’s ending which is the final nail in the coffin. If these scenes didn’t exist, I would be OK with No Country just being an open-to-interpretation/kind-of-clunky western, but no, it just wasn’t enough. The films final scenes (spoilers for an 11 year old movie) finds Moss dead, and Chigurh finishing off his wife before driving away scot-free… only to get into a car accident, realign his broken bones by hand, and then limp away in fear of approaching police. What the fuck was the point of that? Chigurh literally had zero urgency to run. Yes, he is a psycho murderer, but the police don’t know who he is. They have no reason to suspect him of anything. So he’s running because…because. Finally, we have Tommy Lee tells us about his dreams as if they have some sort of meaning that gives the whole movie a new context, but instead just wastes another 10 minutes of your time.

All of these flaws add up to a movie that isn’t bad: just boring and clunky. Nothing about No Country is despicable, but seeing all the labels of perfection attributed to this movie just shouldn’t be accepted. It’s time you do your part, and come to terms with the fact that No Country for Old Men is overrated.