In his screenplay for The Counselor, Cormac McCarthy leaves out the stuff that usually supplies the pleasure in a crime film: the planning, the suspense, conventional scenes of reward and resolution. And there’s only one car chase.
This approach has potential; the author of All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men is one of America’s best living writers, a brilliant stylist whose vision of the world brings us through different visions of hell.
In The Counselor, by stripping away those pleasures, McCarthy mostly leaves the hell.