Movies don’t come much more anticipated than The Counselor,a twisty tale of drug dealing and backstabbing along the Texas border written by Cormac McCarthy, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Michael Fassbender. Yet what on paper sounded like a sure thing turned out to be this fall’s most crushing disappointment. The film, which opened in late October, is less a taut thriller than a series of exasperatingly talky scenes circling around McCarthy’s pet themes: honor, revenge, sexual obsession, and the lengths to which desperate people will go to survive. The contrived plot seems mostly an excuse for the acclaimed novelist to indulge his love of torture, beheadings, and sadistic weaponry (including something he calls the “bolito”—a…The post Cormac Relief appeared first on Texas Monthly.