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 You can't stop what's coming.
Llewelyn Moss: Just how dangerous is he?
Carson Wells: Compared to what? The Bubonic plague?
Not quite a horror film, not quite a noir, not quite an action-thriller. When Llewelyn Moss, a rugged Vietnam veteran, finds the aftermath of a horribly botched drug deal and takes a suitcase filled with money, he sets in motion a spiral of violence beyond his control or even comprehension. An old and unhappy sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, is determined to prove that there's still a place for justice in an otherwise unfair and cruel world, and he sets out to find Moss and protect him from the owners of the money.
But the assassin sent after the stolen money is a complete sociopath, a man willing to do absolutely anything, (to " follow a supreme act of will," as he puts it,) in order to get what he is after. And it's no longer just the money he's after.
The novel is dark and awesome, and The Film Of The Book is even better.
The novel was written by Cormac Mc Carthy, a grizzled old man who refuses to discuss his books beyond their often disturbing content. The movie was written and directed by The Coen Brothers — two oddballs with a great sense of black humor and a love for twisted storylines — but this breathtaking and chillingly eerie film is nothing like anything else they've done.
The film was honored with numerous awards, garnering three British Academy of Film awards, two Golden Globes, and four Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director ( Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay (by Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best Supporting Actor ( Javier Bardem).
Contains examples of:
- Action Survivor: Llewelyn Moss.
- Alone With The Psycho: Most characters in the story find themselves alone and helpless with Anton Chigurh. No one ever shows up to rescue them.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: Mostly of Anton Chigurh.
- Anyone Can Die
- A Simple Plan: A very dark take.
- The Atoner: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Mostly in the book; just hinted at in The Film Of The Book.
- Author Avatar: Sheriff Bell.
- Ax Crazy: Anton Chigurh is a subversion. Even if they don't make sense to a normal person, Chigurh has his reasons, and he's more coldly logical than crazy. A Complete Monster, yes, but not crazy.
- Bad Ass: Anton Chigurh. A Discussed Trope.
- Badass Normal: Llewelyn Moss, who survives several encounters with Chigurh and even fights him off. It doesn't save him from the Mexican hitmen, though.
- Cassandra Truth: "It's full of money."
- Chess With Death: In a couple instances, Chigurh lets a coin toss decide whether or not he'll kill someone.
- Complete Monster: Anton Chigurh.
- Crapsack World: Sheriff Bell seems to believe that this is what the world is becoming.
- Crowning Music Of Awesome: After almost no music for the whole film, Carter Burwell's bone-chilling theme finally plays during the credits, and it is PERFECT. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to hear without simply playing the scene over and over on your DVD, because no soundtrack was released and as far as I can tell it's impossible to find the MP 3 on the Internet.
- Deadpan Snarker: Llewelyn Moss is (at least at first) a carefree one. His wife Carla Jean Moss is a fretful one. Ed Tom Bell is a wistful, morose one. Anton Chigurh is a cold and deadly one.
- Death Is Dramatic: Sometimes, but just as often, averted or even subverted.
- Deconstruction: A specialty both of Cormac Mc Carthy and The Coen Brothers.
- Decoy Protagonist: Llewelyn Moss. Sheriff Bell is actually the real protagonist. Bell gets the opening monologue in the movie and closes the movie. The story is basically about an old man not adapting to the reality of the brutal environment he works in.
- Despair Event Horizon: Bell just about crosses it after the deaths of Llewelyn and Carla Jean. A conversation with his Uncle Ellis reminds him that crime and senseless violence have always been part of life in the region. Bell's narration ends on an ambiguous note as he relates two dreams he had. (They seem to allude to Cormac Mc Carthy's masterpiece The Road.)
- The Determinator: Pretty much all the men in the movie. But Chigurh trumps everyone else.
- Dissonant Serenity: One of the most chilling aspects of Chigurh.
- Downer Ending: Not only is the Decoy Hero murdered (off-screen), but then the villain murders the hero's teenage wife (again, off-screen) and escapes justice, leaving an old man to contemplate his inability to act in the face of so much seemingly pointless violence of the world.
- Draco In Leather Pants: Notice how many of these tropes reference Chigurh.
- The Eighties: Set in 1980.
- Slightly subverted; there's not much big hair, neon clothes, or yuppies out in rural Texas in 1980. There's no '80s pop soundtrack either; it's mostly eerie sound effects or silence.
- Everyone Calls Him Barkeep: One character is credited as "Man Who Hires Wells". See One Scene Wonder, below.
- Fake American: Kelly Macdonald, who plays Carla Jean, hails from Scotland.
- Fashion Victim Villain: Just look at that hair.
- Fluffy The Terrible: Lampshaded; "Chigurh" is pronounced almost like "sugar".
- Chigurh's haircut is one of the least threatening hairdos for a hitman ever. This is something of a meta-example, but upon seeing it for the first time, Javier Bardem noted that he wouldn't be having sex for a while.
- For The Evulz: Anton Chigurh seems this way, although he would insist that he's just following his own code.
- Genre Blind: Llewelyn Moss makes mistakes that anyone even remotely Genre Savvy would have avoided, notably failing to check the money for a transponder before he took it.
- Or is he Genre Savvy? In addition to all his other preparations, he does look for the transponder — but too late. Moreover, whenever he's about to do anything stupid, he usually says out loud that he's about to do something stupid.
- He's probably Wrong Genre Savvy: He knows he's in a dangerous situation and takes great pains to deal with it. He fails to realize how dangerous, but then again, so does every major character in the movie, up to and including Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (who fails to save anyone he sets out to save) and Anton Chigurh (who at one point winds up shot (albeit not badly, relatively speaking) and at another breaks his arm and has a protruding bone — and no way of seeing a doctor about it for a very long time).
- Genre Busting: A specialty of The Coen Brothers.
- Good Ol Boy: Carson Wells, among others.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Several. In at one instance, not just a "discretion shot" but a "discretion cut to a later scene."
- Grim Reaper: Anton Chigurh is tall and clad in black; wields a large metallic weapon; speaks in short and oddly apocalyptic phrases; and cannot be reasoned with at all. Sound familiar?
- Hey Its That Guy: Is that Cromartie talking to the sheriff? Oh God, run. RUN!
- High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Indeed.
- Implacable Man: Stephen Root's character and Chigurh.
- Improbable Weapon User: Chigurh uses a cattle bolt gun (a hand held tool powered by a pneumatic cylinder that violently extends a retractable rod) to dispatch foes. The actor who played him, Javier Bardem, went on the record saying it was too heavy to be practical for a real assassin.
- Though to be fair, he uses it to break locks far more than he uses to murder. And one of the times when he uses it to kill someone, he is posing as a policeman.
- Not to mention his other trademark weapon: a silenced heavy shotgun with a pistol grip. Very unusual, if not as bizarre as the above.
- Informed Attribute: Carson Wells being a Bad Ass. Though he is a Scarily Competent Tracker, we don't see him do much.
- The Ingenue: Carla Jean Moss.
- Karma Houdini: In the end, both the Mexican hitmen and Chigurh escape justice.
- Kill Them All
- Knight In Sour Armor: Sheriff Bell epitomizes this trope.
- Literary Allusion Title: Taken from the poem "Sailing to Byzantium"
 by William Butler Yeats.
- MacGuffin: Moss has a suitcase containing $2 million. Chigurh is hunting Moss to get the money. Bell is hunting Chigurh and simultaneously hunting Moss in hopes of getting him to safety. Chigurh never catches up with Moss, and Bell never catches up with either Moss. Bell and Chigurh almost have a face-off, but Bell never actually sees Chigurh.
- That last is probably just as well: from what we've seen in the rest of the movie, if Bell had confronted Chigurh, he'd have been killed like everyone else.
- Mood Whiplash
- Moral Event Horizon: The Mexican mobsters, when they massacre every guest at the hotel just to kill Moss, and Chigurh, when he murders the innocent widow Carla Jean Moss as a testament to how insane his "principles" are.
- Chigurh crosses the Moral Event Horizon long before that. Carla Jean is the last of many innocent people we see him killing.
- "Can you get those chicken crates out of the bed?"
- Narrator: In the novel, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. In the movie, he narrates the opening, and in his closing scenes, his dialogue becomes more and more like narration.
- New Old West
- No Ending: Played with. As noted above, with the exceptions of Chigurh and Sheriff Bell, every major character dies. A quick shot reveals that Chigurh had found the money in the ventilation system again, and left with the money, but it goes by fast and is irrelevant to the story by this point.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Everything bad happens to Llewelyn Moss because he decided to bring water to a thirsty dying man.
- Wasn't there already the tracking device hidden in his money briefcase? But this attempted act of charity did hasten the ensuing disaster.
- By watching Chigurh use the device, it can be seen that it has a limited range and gives no directional information, just beeping whenever it gets in the vicinity of the transponder. The Mexicans could have driven up and down the county waiting for it to beep and hope they catch Llewelyn before his plane leaves for Acapulco, but having him hand-deliver his truck and the accompanying registration to them probably made things much easier.
- Nostalgia Aint Like It Used To Be: Played with. Sheriff Bell spends the book musing about how someone like Chigurh wouldn't have gotten away with anything in the "old days", but this claim is undermined at the end when his uncle Ellis tells him a tale of how his grandfather was killed in cold blood on his own porch by a trio of Native Americans, and then says to him flat out that claiming the "old days" were better or more moral is nothing but vanity.
- Ominous Walk: Anton Chigurh uses this quite a bit.
- One Scene Wonder: Stephen Root's character, the mysterious boss who hires Carson Wells, is never named and has only one important scene. See Everyone Calls Him Barkeep, above.
- Pet The Dog: Llewelyn goes back to the scene of the gunfight with a full carton of water, out of sympathy for the driver he refused to help earlier ("I ain't got no damn aqua") who was probably dead anyway. For his trouble he gets shot in the shoulder and loses his truck, and leaves a trail that leads Chigurh straight to him. Had Llewelyn been a bit less troubled by his conscience, he might have made the fabled 'clean getaway'.
- Psycho For Hire: Anton Chigurh.
- While he is clearly overshadowed in this aspect by Chigurh, Carson Wells is by his own right a quite psychotic killer.
- Reality Subtext: The book was written partly as a reaction to the escalating violence brought in by drug trafficking starting in the early eighties and continuing to this day. To evoke this, the book and movie are Period Pieces.
- Scarily Competent Tracker: Anton Chigurh and Carson Wells.
- Scenery Gorn: From the shots of the barren, desolate Texas landscape to the long pans over dead bodies in the early stages of decay, this movie has it in spades.
- Scenery Porn: See Scenery Gorn, above.
- Shoot The Shaggy Dog: The climax of the film is starkly anticlimactic, causing many to debate whether it was a brilliant deconstruction or an insulting cop-out.
- Straw Feminist / Strawman Political: In the novel Bell encounters a woman who's deepest abiding wish is for her granddaughter to live in a world where she get an abortion.
- Take A Third Option: Subverted. Carla refuses to call the coin Chigurh flips for her. He kills her anyway.
- Too Dumb To Live: Related to his being Genre Blind (see above) or at least Wrong Genre Savvy, Llewelyn Moss makes several fateful mistakes, such as neither destroying the transponder nor using it as bait to set up a proper trap. If he'd thought about it, he might have managed to kill Chigurh at the hotel in their first shootout. Strong emphasis on might have.
- Villainous Breakdown: Anton Chigurh arguably suffers a flicker of one when Carla Jean refuses to call his coin toss, thus making her the first person in the film to take a stand in direct and face-to-face defiance of his "principles."
Chigurh: This is the best I can do. Call it.
Carla Jean: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you settin' there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.
Chigurh: *smiling* Call it.
Carla Jean: No. I'm not gonna call it.
Chigurh: *smile fades* ...Call it.
- World Half Empty
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Llewelyn Moss.
- Your Mileage May Vary: Both on character interpretations and on the ending.
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