Can't stop what's coming.
So, how dangerous is he?
Compared to what? The bubonic plague?
Not quite a horror film, not quite a noir, not quite an action-thriller. When 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 comprehension. An old and unhappy Sheriff hopes to find this man and protect him from the owners of the money, determined to prove that there's still a place for justice in an otherwise unfair and cruel world.
But the assassin sent after the stolen money is a complete sociopath who answers to no one, a man willing to do absolutely anything ("
follow a supreme act of will," as he puts it), to get what he is after.
The movie is even better than the book, which is darkly awesome.
Written by Cormac McCarthy, a grizzled old man who refuses to discuss his books beyond their extremely disturbing content. 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 they have done before or after.
Contains examples of:
- Alone With The Psycho: Most characters in the story find themselves alone and helpless with Chigurh. No one ever shows up to rescue them.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: Mostly of Chigurh.
- Anvilicious More prominent in the novel, as McCarthy seems to blame modern liberalism for the existence of men like Chigurh.
- Author Avatar: Sheriff Bell serves as the spokesman for McCarthy's deeply conservative politics.
- Ax Crazy: Anton Chigurh defines the trope, killing several people for no reason at all.
- This troper would argue Chigurh is a subversion. They don't make sense to a normal person, but Chigurh has his reasons, and he's anything but crazy. Evil, yes, but not crazy.
- Bad Ass: Llewelyn Moss (himself a pretty dangerous fellow) describes Chigurgh as "the ultimate badass.")
- Chaotic Evil: Anton Chigurh.
- Character Alignment: In addition to Chigurh, we've got Moss (True Neutral) and Sheriff Bell (Lawful Good).
- Chess With Death: In a couple instances, Chigurh let a coin toss decide whether or not to 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: No, really. After next to no music whatsoever in the entirety of the 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.
- Decoy Protagonist: Llewelyn Moss. Sheriff Bell is actually the real protagonist. Bell gets the opening monologue in the movie as well as closes the movie. The story is basically about him not adapting to the reality of the environment he is in.
- Despair Event Horizon: Bell flirts with crossing it after Moss' death. A conversation with his Uncle Ellis reminds him that crime and senseless violence have always been part of life in the region, and his narration ends on an ambiguous note.
- Dissonant Serenity: One of the most chilling aspects of Chigurh.
- Downer Ending: Not just the hero being killed off screen, but the villain killing the hero's teenage wife and escaping justice and leaving an old man to contemplate his inability to act against the violence of the world.
- Draco In Leather Pants: As an example, how many of these tropes don't 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"
- Fake American: Kelly Macdonald, who plays Carla Jean, is from Scotland.
- Fashion Victim Villain: Just look at that hair.
- Fluffy The Terrible: Lampshaded; "Chigurh" is pronounced almost like "sugar".
- Genre Blind: Llewelyn makes mistakes that anyone even remotely genre savvy would have avoided such as not checking the money for a transponder before he took it.
- Good Ol Boy: Carson Wells, among others.
- 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?
- Really? This troper was flabbergasted when he read the reviews after leaving the theater that described Chigurh as basically death incarnate. I honestly thought he was supposed to be a joke character, like Donny from The Big Lebowski, because his gimmicks were so implausible and likely to backfire, and every exchange he has he's portrayed as a rambling incoherent. Though, obviously, my mileage did vary.
- Being a supernatural presence is probably the only plausible way to explain how he gets away with it all.
- 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 too much.
- Karma Houdini: Both the Mexican hitmen and Chigurh escape justice in the end
- Knight In Sour Armor: Sheriff Bell epitomizes this trope.
- Literary Allusion Title: Taken from the epic poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Yeats.
- MacGuffin: Moss has a suitcase containing $2 million. Chigurh is hunting the money. Bell is hunting Chigurh.
- Moral Event Horizon: The Mexican mobsters when they massacre all hotel guests only to kill Moss, and Chigurh 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.
- New Old West
- No Ending: Played with as noted above every character except Chigurh and Sheriff Bell 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 at this point.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Everything bad happens to Llewelyn Moss because he decided to bring water to a thirsty dying man.
- 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.
- Psycho For Hire: Anton Chigurh.
- 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: 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.
- 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.
- Too Dumb To Live: Partially related to his not being genre savvy (see above), Llewelyn Moss makes several mistakes such as either not destroying the transponder or not setting up a proper trap with it. If he'd thought about it, he might have managed to kill Chigurh at the hotel in their first shootout
- World Half Empty
- Your Mileage May Vary: On both character interpretations and the ending, as noted above.
