It's filthy, nasty, sexy, absurd, appalling, and exhilarating, and it succeeds as a musky union of novelist Cormac McCarthy's bleakness and Ridley Scott's sense of chic.

A great writer's pompous idea of pulp fiction, treated with stultifying seriousness by everyone else involved.

Each scene serves as little more than an index card for the mechanistic plot, which Scott films in a glossy and fluid style befitting an industrial promotion for the movie's high-tech weaponry.

The Counselor is the cumbersome end product of a high-minded writer trying to slum and a slick director aiming for cosmic depth.

It's not so much a bad film as it is a disappointing one. A very disappointing one.