For someone in the upper echelons of the film community, Ridley Scott doesn’t half produce a lot of crap. For every good film he makes, there’s a steamer in his back pocket. He gives us Gladiator but he also gives us Hannibal. He gives us Blade Runner but he also gives us Legend. He gives us Black Hawk Down and Alien but he also gives us Robin Hood, GI Jane and Thelma and Louise. You never know where you stand with Sir Ridley.

The Counselor is firmly in the steamer category. It doesn’t possess one, single redeemable quality. The acting is horrible, the dialogue is atrocious, the plot makes no sense and it looks like shit. If anything, it looks more like a Tony Scott film from the 80s than a Ridley Scott movie. There’s plenty of smoke and backlighting.

But Ridley is desperately trying to make this into a glossy, luxurious, decadent crime epic. Instead it resembles a Ferrero Rocher commercial or some cheesy advert in the front pages of Vogue. For fuck’s sake, there’s a scene where Javier Bardem and Cameron Diaz are watching their pet cheetahs hunt prey in the desert. They’re decked out in designer safari outfits. These people are the two biggest assclowns in the history of the world. Forget Kim and Kanye, these two dickheads have them licked.

Compounding matters is the fact that Javier Bardem has a haircut that makes him look like Sonic the Hedgehog and that Cameron Diaz has a cheetah tattoo on her back along with a gold tooth and fingernails that look like claws. Do you get it? She’s a hunter like her pet cheetahs. She’s bad news. Subtle, no?

Just in case that wasn’t enough evidence for you to prove that Diaz’s character is a little touched in the head, there’s a scene where she fucks Javier Bardem’s car. Yeah, you’re reading that right. She fucks Javier Bardem’s car. Before you get ahead of me, no, she doesn’t have sex with the exhaust pipe or the gear stick. What are you, a fucking pervert or something? Geez. No, she decides to hump the windshield instead. Javier Bardem’s character watches in horror. He says that watching her rub herself on the glass was too gynecological to be sexy. He likens her pussy to a catfish. Charming image, no? But somehow, rather than hit the gas pedal and propel the crazy woman off his car, or take her home, say he has a headache and never return her calls, he continues to pursue a romantic relationship with this mentalist. A woman who fucked his car! A woman who did the splits, lifted up her skirt and humped his windshield. For me, that’s pretty high up on the list of reasons to break up a relationship. Cheating is bad, as is lying and stealing, but shagging a car is just weird and disturbing. Whats’ next? The TV? The oven? Random door handles? The cats?

Over time we’re supposed to get the idea that Diaz is some kind of evil genius. She attempts to steal some drugs from the Mexican drug cartel but then fucks up along the way. However, this doesn’t stop her from stealing the money she wants and brutally killing Brad Pitt’s character. In the final scene she mentions how hunters have grace, beauty and purity of heart. The film then ends with her saying that she’s famished. You see what she’s saying? She’s the hunter. She’s the one that’s pure of heart, she’s the one that’s beautiful. Wow, I spent two hours watching a bad thriller so that you can verbally wank yourself off.

It also cracks me that up that during this final scene, Diaz is sitting in a restaurant, wearing a hood. You can see that her male companion is shitting himself. ‘This woman is crazy. First of all she turns up for our date looking like Emperor Palpatine, now she’s talking about herself being a hunter. Can I escape before she gets her catfish out and humps the creme brulee?’

It doesn’t help that all of this egocentric nonsense is coming out of the mouth of Cameron Diaz. She doesn’t have an ounce of danger in her body. She doesn’t convey a shred of intelligence. Not for a single second do I think that she’s capable of any of this. This role would have demanded an actress much finer than her. Diaz just comes over as a cheap hood rat. Lots of the time she’s duck facing. And there’s one particularly hideous scene where she’s talking to Penelope Cruz about a diamond ring. She’s supposed to be imparting her vast knowledge. But instead she just sounds like a robot reading cue cards.

And what the hell is with her make-up? She doesn’t look like a cheetah. She looks like a panda with a fake tan. She’s painful to look at.

Something else that doesn’t sit well is the pointlessly contrived extreme violence. In one sequence, Diaz hires a couple of people to steal from the Mexican drug cartel. In order to get the drug cartel’s vehicle to work, she has to obtain a special component from a guy on a motorbike. The component is in his helmet. Now how would you go about stealing from this guy on a motorbike? Knock him off his bike with your car? Shoot him? Or drive miles and miles ahead of him and spend ages setting up a wire that will decapitate him? With this wire you have to spend lots of time measuring and you have to make sure that he drives down a particular road and you have to set it up at night so that he can’t see it. You also have to make sure that the guy looks up so that he can present his neck for you. To do this, you need to make sure to hit some car lights at the crucial moment. But surely this is the most logical option? Much better than shooting the guy and taking his helmet off. But yeah, these people do indeed set up this wire and his head does indeed roll.

Foreshadowing another bloody set-piece is a conversation between Javier Bardem and Michael Fassbender. Bardem tells The Counsellor about an innovative way to kill someone. He tells a story about a device that slowly garotes you. A wire is looped around someone’s head and then a motor slowly tightens the wire. Eventually it cuts through your neck and through your arteries. Again, as a method of execution, this seems to be a little fussy. Plus it lacks the personal touch. At least in the past some burly guy would have to huff and puff and use some muscle to kill you. This is the millennial way to kill someone - it’s like having a fucking app do it. Throw something over someone’s head, press a button and voila!

But you know that this machine is going to turn up later in the film and indeed it does. Brad Pitt is hiding out in London and Cameron Diaz gets one of her underlings to throw this thing over his head. Sure enough it tightens around his neck. And then as he tries to pull it off, the wire cuts through his fingers and chops them off before severing the arteries in his neck, leaving him to die in geysers of blood. Again, this just seems silly. It’s too contrived. Just shoot him with a silencer. What happened to the cool, civilised ways of killing someone?

I haven’t talked much about the story, have I? Or Michael Fassbender. It doesn’t matter. The story is complete nonsense, the dialogue is pretentious drivel and Michael Fassbender has nothing to do. He’s just an idiot patsy who gets what’s coming to him. Oh, wouldn’t it be a great idea, seeing as I’m a lawyer and already making lot of money, to suddenly get in the drug business? And to do business with the Mexican drug cartel. That sounds like the best idea in the history of the world. Nothing could possibly go wrong. Oh wait, everything’s gone wrong and my future wife has been kidnapped and they’ve made a snuff film where they behead her and she’s been dumped in a landfill. Who could have guessed?

Wait, this was written by Cormac McCarthy? Shit in my boots and call me a whore. How? Why? What...the...fuck?!?

Quentin Tarantino is trying his hardest to be Sergio Leone. However, he's not always succeeding.

Case in point: the scene where the beautiful heroine gets killed by a Nazi war hero/movie star/stud muffin. It has Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, it has two senseless deaths and it’s exquisitely filmed. But it doesn't pull the heart strings - it doesn't have the power to illicit emotion like Leone's films did. Instead it reeks of someone trying hard to pay homage to a master and coming close to equalling them but just falling short.

The problem is that the relationship between the two characters isn't deserving of such an operatic sequence. Here we have a Nazi soldier who develops a fondness for a French Jew (he doesn't know that she's a Jew). What results are a few scenes of him pestering the poor girl. We never really get the impression that she has any fondness for the man. In fact, she seems to hate him. After all, her family was slaughtered by Nazis. So everything comes to a head during the final sequence at a Nazi film premiere. The war hero wants to see the girl and literally won’t take no for an answer - he breaks into the projection booth. The girl then makes out that she's interested in fucking him and shoots him in the back. Okay, one less Nazi in the world - excellent. But then the girl watches the film that is playing in the cinema - a film that both stars and is about the war hero's exploits in Italy (alone in a sniper's nest, he killed more than three hundred men). For some reason she seems moved by his ordeal and goes to comfort him. He then shoots her and kills her as Morricone blasts on the soundtrack. Had there been more complexity in relationship or had there been any chemistry between the two or even if the Nazi hadn't been a prick and tried to break into the projection booth so that he could fuck the girl, I would have enjoyed the scene more. But instead, emotionally, it falls completely flat. Yes it’s well filmed and choreographed, but that's not enough. Tarantino still doesn't quite have the skill to engage the emotions.

Tarantino is far better suited to suspense sequences and action scenes. The opening is an excellent example of what Tarantino does best. Yes it has its nods to Leone and spaghetti westerns with the slow arrival of the main villain and the Morricone that pounds on the soundtrack, but once the characters begin talking it’s distinctly QT. A Nazi Colonel called Hans Landa, a man nicknamed ‘The Jew Hunter’, talks with a French farmer. He very politely inquires after some local Jews – he’s been charged with hunting them down. The farmer says he doesn’t know where they are. What makes the scene so engrossing is how overly cordial it is. The Nazi Colonel doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t threaten the man. He’s actually charming. And using this charm he manages to get the farmer to confess that he’s hiding the Jews under the floorboards. We then have a brief burst of violence as some Stormtroopers enter the property so that they can shoot through the floorboards and kill the cowering Jews.

It’s this duality that makes Landa such an entertaining character – he’s charming but horrible; he’s funny but disgusting. Summing this up is a scene where he talks to Shosanna, the lone survivor of the massacre that opens the film. Landa isn’t aware of who she is, so he’s very friendly, very charming; his French is impeccable. But at the same time there’s something off about him. For one he’s very insistent that she must eat some strudel. Secondly, once he’s sated, he sticks his cigarette into his food. It’s the smallest hint of his true nature – that he isn’t the charming sophisticate he purports to be.

A favourite Landa moment of mine is when he confronts a German actress at a Nazi film premiere. He’s just discovered that she’s defected to the Allies and that she was involved in a gun battle – she got shot in her leg. Therefore he’s highly amused when she tries to convince him that she got her injury in a mountain climbing accident. His laughter is so over the top and hysterical that even she knows that he knows that she’s lying. It’s a very amusing moment but it’s promptly followed by his grisly murder of her. He takes her to his office and strangles her to death. Again humour and violence queasily co-exist with one another.

The end of the film sees the height of the film’s comedy. However, it also illustrates one of the film’s problems. You see, Landa decides to defect to the Allies. It’s never fully explained why he does this. Maybe he sees the writing on the wall for the Nazi party and decides to get out while he can. Who knows? But as he’s negotiating he suddenly exclaims, in a very camp, childlike way, ‘That’s a bingo!’ It’s a moment that had me howling with laughter but I’m not sure whether it really helps the movie. Yeah the film is amusing but sometimes the humour works against the film as a whole – it makes the characters more cartoonish and reduces the amount of tension.

Another example of this is when the ‘Basterds’ sneak into the Nazi premiere. Their German speaking members have been killed and so Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine says that he and another couple of soldiers will attend the premiere as Italian filmmakers, and seeing as Raine can speak the best Italian, he’ll do most of the talking. Cue Brad Pitt saying ‘grazie’ in a redneck accent. Yes it’s very, very funny, but it kind of makes Raine look buffoonish. Suddenly he doesn’t seem like a dangerous platoon leader – he’s a clown.

The same goes for the other Basterds who attend the premiere. One of them is a fearsome soldier who kills Nazis with a baseball bat. But at the end he also becomes a buffoonish figure speaking stereotypical ‘I-talian’.

That being said, he does redeem himself at the very end by pretending to be a waiter and glassing a Nazi soldier. He then breaks into an opera box and kills Hitler. The wish-fulfilment here is fantastic and he even shoots Hitler repeatedly in the face as his dead body lies on the floor – Tarantino is rewriting history for us and making it considerably more satisfying.

The final action scene, though, brought another film to mind. As the Basterds dispatched Nazis in a suicidal attack I couldn’t help but think of the machine gun scene in The Wild Bunch. The scene here isn’t anywhere close to that piece of genius but it does the job – you get to see the most important people in the Nazi party get shot, burnt and blown to bits. You’d have to be a fascist or the most insane bleeding heart liberal not to get a kick out of it.

The end of the film has Aldo Raine proclaiming that this might be his masterpiece. I wonder whether Tarantino thinks the same way. If he does, he’s mistaken. As hugely enjoyable as the film is, there are too many things working against it for it to be considered truly great. The buffoonish humour, the sometimes strange character motivations and the unsuccessful attempts to produce emotion all work against it. As does the incredibly strange casting of Mike Myers as a British officer. His scene is one of the worst in the film, as he’s basically playing a toffee-nosed Austin Powers. Thankfully though, he’s on and off the screen in no time.

After the dizzying heights of Zodiac, David Fincher comes crashing back to earth with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here’s a film with a marvellous premise – a man being born old and gradually growing younger – that never takes flight. It’s a bafflingly empty experience.

The key problem is the passivity of the main character. Do we ever get to know him? Do we ever get inside his head? No we don’t. And there’s such scope for human emotion. Here’s a man who’s unlike any other. Here’s a man destined to become more youthful and beautiful as those around him decay and wither. But we never get any sense of sadness, or confusion, or anger. Benjamin Button never asks ‘why me?’ He just glides through life, seemingly all too happy to have been thrown this curveball.

But just think of what could have been done with this character. Denied youth for almost 60 years, and forced to become humble before his time, he could have given into brashness and arrogance later in life. Instead he just sleeps with a couple of women (or three). Or he could have even suffered the ignominy of having a youthful body but an old mind. He could have suffered the onset of dementia while looking like James Dean. But no, as a young man (even though he’s apparently old inside) he seems to have a young mind, too. So therefore I didn’t feel anything for him because he didn’t seem to feel anything himself. The only time the character seems to have some real sense of self-awareness is when he leaves his beloved Daisy because she’s pregnant and he doesn’t want her to have to bring up two children. But this is done is a completely half-assed manner. They have a stilted conversation and he goes. Instead of coming over as a doomed individual, he just seems flaky, and where’s the tragedy in that?

The only time I really felt anything for Benjamin was when he becomes a child and he can’t remember anything. At one point he sits on the roof and thinks he can fly. To have lived a full life and to lose all those memories to the passage of time is truly sad, but the film just suddenly comes to this. There’s no progression. You never get the feeling that things are slipping away from Button. One minute he’s a beautiful teenager with his memory and character intact, and the next he’s a helpless child. I wanted to feel time slipping away from him. I wanted to feel the terror that he’d feel, knowing that he was shrinking into himself. But instead the ending kind of feels like an afterthought. It’s there to tie everything up.

Despite this, at the end, you have the film’s most beautiful and heartbreaking image – a long shot of two old lovers walking down the street, but one of those people is an elderly lady and the other is a child. It has a strangeness that makes it striking and touching – the devotion of Daisy to see things through to the end finally makes you feel something for these people.

Unfortunately, though, there’s no chemistry between Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Therefore most of the film is a dead loss. How are you supposed to invest in characters when the passion between them is non-existent?

And Fincher’s idea of romance is more than a little adolescent. What do Benjamin and Daisy do when they finally become an item? Why they go sailing into the sunset on a beautiful yacht, of course. Pur-lease. I’d expect this from someone like Richard Curtis, not the man who made Zodiac and Seven.

And the scene where a teenage Benjamin turns up to woo an elderly Daisy one last time just doesn’t work. It’s meant to be the emotional highlight, but it’s just a little weird. And it’s weird because the teenage Button seems to have completely black, lifeless eyes. It really put me off. And it also doesn’t work because it all feels more than a little cold. This is meant to be their last hurrah, but it feels like either of them could take it or leave it. I never got the feeling that this was some great romance.

You also have to get over the fact that the two characters first meet when one looks very old and when one looks very young. Does this ever enter their minds? Does Daisy fantasise about the wrinkly old man and does Benjamin fantasise about the perky, little girl? Who knows…

Another relationship that doesn’t work is the one between Benjamin and his father. You see, Benjamin’s father is dismayed when he sees that his son is ugly as sin. Therefore he goes through town and dumps him on the steps of an old person’s home. You’d think this abandonment might piss Benjamin off. But it doesn’t really. When he finally finds out who his father is he seems nonplussed. He doesn’t really go searching for answers to who he is – he just politely listens. This crushing passivity suffocates drama at every turn.

The only really enjoyable element of the film is the visuals. The film is gorgeous to look at. In particular, I love the first scene where Thomas Button runs through town as fireworks burst in the air (it’s the end of the Great War). The photography is gorgeous and the period detail is impeccable. But pretty early on you realise this is all the film has to offer – a beautiful exterior without a heart. Honestly, I ended up using the film as a kind of clothes catalogue. I’ve already noted that I should get a white t-shirt and leather jacket (although I guess I’ll do without the Triumph motorcycle). But aside from that, I got nothing from this movie.

And it’s quite sad when the trailer for the film is so much better than the film itself. Just watch the first teaser. It literally shows the whole film from beginning to end, only minus the lifeless filler in-between. It got me really excited for this film – it looked like it had something magical to offer. But along the way someone forgot that a film doesn’t exist on beautiful visuals alone – you need a human drama to anchor it, something that is sorely lacking here.