Originally Posted by northern_dave
You got your Tommy Lee with the ever developing wisdom and a lingering dad issue.

You got your mop head psycho dragging around a slaughter house rod gun and an air tank.

You got your military veteran cowboy that's almost tough enough.

You got your snarky hitman that ain't near tough enough.

You got a whole string of dead folks.

You got your inconclusive $hitty ending that you might choose to pretend to get on a deep level because it's easier to do that than to accept the fact that you just wasted 2 hours watching this crap and they forgot to write the ending.


Never read the book myself but it sounds like the movie No Country for Old Men pretty much closely follows the novel by Cormac McCarthy titled the same. It too had mixed reviews --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Country_for_Old_Men

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Literary significance and criticism

The early critical reception of the novel was mixed. William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15, 2005), characterizes McCarthy as "our greatest living writer" and describes the book as "a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames".[2] On the other hand, in the July 24, 2005, issue of The New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum", but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages".[3]

In contrast, literary critic Harold Bloom does not count himself among the admirers of No Country for Old Men, stating that it lacked the quality of McCarthy's best works, particularly Blood Meridian, and compared it to William Faulkner's A Fable. When comparing the lack of "moral argument" in Blood Meridian to the heightened morality present in No Country for Old Men, he considered stating that the "apocalyptic moral judgments" made in No Country for Old Men represented "a sort of falling away on McCarthy's part".[4]

The novel has received a significant amount of critical attention, for example, Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach and Jim Welsh's edited collection No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film[5] or Raymond Malewitz's "Anything Can Be an Instrument: Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men."[6]