(Watch The Counselor Online) When I read The Crossing, I believed it to be the finest American novel in the Southern Gothic tradition since Faulkner rolled up Yoknapatawpha County under his arm and went home. Then I read Blood Meridian, and thought I was in the presence of maybe the most important American author since, who, Pynchon? But after that, Cormac McCarthy dried up. I didn't care for Cities on the Plain, his wrapping up of the lauded "Border Trilogy" that began with All the Pretty Horses and sandwiched The Crossing in between, and I thought No Country For Old Men was weak and obvious, lacking fire, while The Road was well and completely flaccid. Going backwards didn't help: Child of God was a fragment, Suttree had that bit with the pig but not much else, and the incest fairytale Outer Dark seemed a sketch.

(Watch The Counselor Movie Online) But then the Coens adapted No Country for Old Men as a summary critique of the key themes of McCarthy's work, and I was entranced again, or at least willing to give his stuff a shot again. It's the mark of a gifted critic, and the Coens are our most gifted literary critics, to reanimate something that's been dead for a while. So we land here, following a too-faithful screen translation of The Road and the curious, forgettable, elderly HBO flick The Sunset Limited (first written by McCarthy as a play) with the inevitability of a film, The Counselor, based on an original screenplay by McCarthy, supervised by McCarthy to the point of McCarthy giving line readings to frickin' Michael Fassbender, and promoted with McCarthy billed almost as prominently in the breathless trailer as director Ridley Scott and co-star Brad Pitt. And, yes, this film by a novelist twenty years past his prime, dabbling now in a new medium like old Michael Jordan playing baseball, stinks of an almost Greek hubris, an almost Icarean overreaching. The Counselor is uniquely awful.

(Watch The Counselor Online) Start with the misogyny. The Counselor hates women. Not in any interesting way, just in an angry old-guy way, as long stretches of dialogue focus in on how women are either sexually voracious, Kali-destroyer goddesses with vaginas like the mouths of catfish ("It was too gynecological to be sexy," one of our poor male jackrabbits complains), or sexually ripe blood-puppies at the beck and call of handsome guys bearing large diamonds and maybe cardboard bundles of cash. Asked to talk dirty, one of the latter variety can only muster, "I want you to put a hand up my dress." As delivered by mumbly/squeaky Penelope Cruz, it's more a cold shower than an inviting come-on.

(Watch The Counselor Online) But then, as her character Laura's unnamed lawyer-boyfriend explores the landscape, he discovers that she's "sopping." That's right. She's likened to a child, but she's moist down there--not too fine a point that it isn't raised again later, right before her stupidity places her in the traditional role of hostage/victim in her boyfriend's story. The worst is Cameron Diaz's cat-eyed, cheetah-obsessed, accent-indeterminate Malkina, consort of lovable go-between Reiner (Javier Bardem) and absolutely incapable of delivering the mouthfuls shovelled in there by McCarthy.

(Watch The Counselor Online) She's the fatale, I guess, in this bombastically empty moral fable (the film is a companion piece in more ways than one to Denis Villeneuve's similarly-pitched Prisoners), and asking her to be the smartest person in a room isn't merely ill-advised, it seems cruel. It's the same kind of miscalculation as casting young Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III as the object of all desire, so off that it confuses the characters' motivations. In a thriller this densely-plotted, you don't recover once it starts to wobble; The Counselor starts to wobble immediately.

The titular Counselor (Fassbender) needs money, possibly to buy a giant diamond for sweet, dumb, horny Laura, so he agrees somehow to be involved in a drug deal with the Mexican cartel. We know all about the Mexican cartel, because either we watch "Breaking Bad" or we're generally xenophobic, and so we know this isn't a good idea. Many people, including the Counselor's partners in this endeavour, Westray (Pitt) and Reiner, try to warn him in long, wandering monologues that express the moral morass of the universe. Try to understand, there's only madness out there,(Download The Counselor) and entropy, and sin, lots of sin, you-can't-avoid-it levels of sin.