It is difficult to know who to blame, or where to start. Ridley Scott has always been good at making his movies look ravishing.
This isn’t rave material, but he tries. After that, he falls asleep.
The plot shouts for help under an avalanche of pompous dialogue, but is not heard. Its death is covered up with gratuitous violence and Cameron Diaz making love to a bright yellow Ferrari.
How many studs does it take to kill a star? Here we have a red carpet laid down across a muddled storyline for these stellar actors to meander casually from one side of the Mexican border to another.
Yes, here we are again, in the world of Traffic, drug smugglers and confusion, except, in this case, you need to add the words “pointless” and “boring.” What could have been a masterpiece, becomes a train wreck. No-one knows what is going on, especially the audience. You wait, like a teenager outside a West End premiere, for the appearance of Brad Pitt, or Penelope Cruz, or Javier Bardem, or Diaz in an animal suit, or Michael (who he?) Fassbender.
Even as a thriller, the film plays hard to get. Somehow, somewhere, the arty farts have taken over the asylum and neither Scott, nor his talented cast, can persuade them to stick to principles and stop spouting cod philosophical monologues.
Sadly the fault lies with Cormac McCarthy’s script. As a novelist (All The Pretty Horses, The Road) he is considered one of America’s finest.
The message after this tedious tank of trash is “Stick to the day job.”