Here comes my controversial statement. This movie, a terrific movie, one of the better works by the Coen Brothers, is a movie I’d like to see one more time. The Coens’ have made “worse” films – The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty for example – that I can still watch over and over again. Does that make sense? If you are a Coens fan it might.
This is a splendid movie with some wonderful sequences, but it is very normal. There is none of the verbal play that comes with a Coens film – or only trace elements of it. There is hardly any humor at all. The most serious of their films, the grossly overlooked The Man Who Wasn’t There, still has all that weird spaceship shit in it.
Am I panning this movie in any way? No. It is fantastic, and will probably land on my top ten list of the year. All of those dialogue-free sequences at the motel(s) are just to die for. All of the listening through walls, light creeping in from under the door. Plus, they take a beat straight out of Body/Antibody! (scroll to the bottom of this to figure out what I mean.) Anyway, fun stuff – and the cattle gun (or captive bolt stunner) has inspired the geniuses at UGO to think about great movie weapons. So that’s a reason to like the movie right there.