Blood brothers

All the elements of an action-thriller are here: the body count, the chases, the suspenseful camera shots of doorknobs and grizzled men with guns. Yet "Die Hard" this ain't. \nTaking the genre exercise seriously, the Coen Brothers craft each scene to perfection. There's just enough shaky-cam in those chases, and for a movie with this much wanton slaughter, it's not sloppy. Every shot lasts just long enough to establish something -- a man sawing a shotgun or a cop drinking a glass of milk -- then moves on, with nothing left to spare. \nThe plot of the movie, based faithfully on a Cormac McCarthy novel, is an old one: Our hero finds and takes someone else's money, and then everyone tries to kill him, with the cops in clumsy pursuit. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the ex-Marine with the misfortune of taking the drug money, finds himself pursued by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a psychopathic hit man with no morality and the worst pageboy haircut this side of He-Man. Tommy Lee Jones plays the cop two steps behind, and Woody Harrelson provides unexpected comic relief as a hit-man competitor.\nBefore I get to Bardem's dead-eyed performance, which will dominate any conversation following the movie, I want to mention how hard it is to evaluate "No Country." On one hand, everything about it is formally faultless: from the lighting and soundtrack to the acting and directing, nothing falls out of place. But this technical precision makes the movie all the more unsettling, because it exudes nothing but death, nihilism and testosterone-fueled masculine apocalypse. \nLook, for example, at how blood oozes everywhere in "No Country for Old Men." Across hotel room floors and down limping legs, we see that sticky red mess spreading out, but Chigurh always picks his feet up, checking his boots for any trace of his victims.\nAnd it's the assassin Chigurh who transfixes us, daring us to laugh at his ridiculous non sequiturs (and hair) right before he blows our brains out. Bardem turns in an extraordinarily sinister performance, sure to draw comparisons to Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter. Bardem's character, however, has none of Lecter's sophistication; he's a force of nature independent of civilization or society. As Harrelson's character says, Chigurh lives by a different but severe moral code.\nPerhaps, then, this is where my problem with the movie lies. Its dips into metaphysics can't compare to the magnificent and hypnotizing storytelling, and much like their murderous creation Chigurh, the Coens create swaths of violence without passion or purpose. Then, when all the carnage rests and the credits roll, they put their feet up and check for stains. Sure, the filmmaking stretches miles beyond "Hostel II," but is the message any different? Is mankind really doomed to hideous violence?\nThere's no doubt that the Coens have made a masterpiece. Whether you'll enjoy it is another story.