The Oct. 25 release of a highly anticipated collaboration between American author Cormac McCarthy and director Ridley Scott has already excited audiences. The gritty thriller film, The Counselor, was directed by Scott, born from McCarthy's first original screenplay and distributed by the powerhouse production company 20th Century Fox. With a gold mine of A-list celebrities comprising its cast and an impressive budget of $25 million, the film was produced in a decisively successful manner, bringing in almost $17 million at the box office during its first weekend of playing.

But even with all of the creature comforts and industry connections that the production benefitted from, the finished film did have moments of weakness. The media hype and publicity around the film gave me an inexact set of expectations-what I thought would be a clever action thriller akin to The Bourne Identity franchise was actually a more subversive flick. The Counselor's brand of violence was much more grisly and less sensational than is characteristic for the sort of film it was marketed to be.

Michael Fassbender plays a lawyer known only as "the counselor," who breaks into the dangerous drug trafficking world along the Texas-Mexico border, given an "in" with business partner Reiner (Javier Bardem), that is negotiated by another drug kingpin, Westray (Brad Pitt). The cast is rounded out by the counselor's beautiful but tragically innocent fianc?(c)e Laura (Penelope Cruz) and Reiner's dangerously intelligent and cunning girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz). The dynamics between characters serve as a reminder that McCarthy's acclaim first came from writing novels: the storyline bumps between the two pairs of foil characters, Reiner and Westray, and Laura and Malkina, and finds the counselor caught in the middle of moral dilemmas on their behalves.

The characters were developed carefully through episodes of both love and violence, each serving to further morally corrupt them, and the viewer's entertainment came from the way that they dealt with their own disintegrating morality. The contrast between love and immorality is artfully done here.

The first scene, for example, shows the counselor and Laura playfully holding and kissing each other in their bed under a crisp white sheet. From the first scene to the second, the camera's point of view shifts from above the sheet to underneath, where the two smile and touch lovingly-and then the scene abruptly transitions to the trafficking of cocaine as it is welded into metal barrels in a sewage truck across the border.

Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the film was how highly stylized and strange the characters were in contrast to one another. Reiner's highlighted hair is perpetually spiked up in all directions, framing his purple-tinted eyeglasses that clash with his brightly colored, mismatched outfits and gaudy gold necklaces and watches. Malkina's getup isn't much better. Her increasingly revealing series of outfits is complimented by sky-high heels and flashy jewelry, offsetting a shiny gold manicure, a gold tooth, dark eye makeup and cheetah print tattoos that climb from her back to the top of her neck. That being said, Diaz still gives a stellar and highly developed performance as the sociopathic and overly sexual Malkina, and at one point, even acts out a sex scene with Reiner's Ferrari in order to impress him.

By the end of the film, the decline of morality had bested the counselor, and the series of decisions he made that entered him into the drug business-starting with giving in to Westray's proposition of a buy-in that promised a 4,000 percent return-ultimately robbed him of everything he loved. I can't say that I didn't see this coming, and as the viewer, it was a bit anticlimactic of an ending but nonetheless action-packed.

The Counselor would have been, in my opinion, a much more interesting novel than film, but it was still a visually stunning final product, and I don't at all regret seeing it. For your next action film fix, give The Counselor a try, but in case the twisty character development doesn't sate your need for excitement, don't forget the extra large popcorn and some Milk Duds.

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