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Whoah. This isn't one to miss. Granted, it ain't a date movie (unless you've been dating this person a while), but what a damn movie. The Coen Brothers have already made a name for themselves, but this sure is one for the resume.

In this film that creeps without dragging, Josh Brolin is Llewelyn Moss, a simple hick who finds a bundle of drug money in a deal gone wrong on his hunting grounds. While his character isn't on a holy mission to win over the audience, the story's so convincing and the tone so eerily and plainly real while artistically captivating, the fact that most any of us would take the money if it were going to just sit there and rot with a bunch of lousy drug dealers is enough to make us sympathize with Moss and hope he doesn't die at the hands of Anton Chigurgh, a psychopath hitman played by Javier Bardem in a role that may end up on as many walls as any other classic screen villain one day.

Tommy Lee Jones is Sheriff Bell, a worn old lawman who cannot be phased any longer by the evil people are capable of. One may think they've seen Jones play this Texas sheriff role a million times by now, but one also can't possibly conjure up anyone who could embody Bell like Jones does in this. Not that there's a flaw in anyone's performance here, but Woody Harrelson's hired Southern gentleman killer is the best thing he's done in years, and Kelly MacDonald is heartbreaking as Moss' simple wife.

The plot is simple -- Moss finds the dough, Chigurgh and Bell both go after him, one will get to him first. It's the themes that make this whole work of art such a grabber; the blindly retarded power of plain greed, the reality of evil's existence, and the importance of choice. Not one thing went wrong for me till the very end, where I finally was about to almost get tired of an old man telling a story, then all of a sudden the flick ended as I began to zone off just one hair for the first time in two hours (I had to piss from the getgo and held it without a shred of hesitation, that's the quality level here).

Fortunately, I did catch the last line and then let my subconscious fill me in on the middle of the story being told by the old man, but unfortunately I still could've used something more. The conclusion was exactly that, a conclusion, as if a sum-up sentence at the end of a good essay that restate's the paper's main point.

While the flick bowed out abruptly yet gracefully, I still could've used one tiny wee bit of a change in tone from the character speaking to leave the theater with some small shred of hope, but I guess that just wasn't what this one's about. This film is there to lay it out that there is evil out there, that it comes in the form of people who are bad, and that the only way to not spend your life frightened or sorrowed by that is to wake the phuck up and accept that.
 
(five bongs)

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