No Country For Old Men Blu Ray Review

Posted by Film-Critic

September 27, 2008

Javier Bardem gives one of the most unsettling performances of the decade in this stunning HD transfer (c) Paramount

No Country For Old Men won 4 Oscars. Let’s get that out of the way first. It gave the impossibly talented Joel and Ethan Coen their 2nd, 3rd and 4th Oscars in an already impressive career and introduced Javier Bardem to the world as a pudding-bowl-haircut sporting assassin. It is a quiet film, a thoughtful film, at times an exceptionally violent and blackly funny film. Having not yet seen There Will Be Blood I can’t comment on whether or not it’s the best film of it’s year, but the Academy thought so and that’s what counts. It is, definitely, a very good film.

The transfer to Blu Ray is amazing. As no-one reading this knows where I live, let’s make a point that I have a 37″ LG TV and a Playstation 3 acting as my Blu Ray player. Up until watching this film I considered the best use of them to be the Planet Earth series from the BBC (or perhaps Metal Gear Solid 4 from Konami), but the picture quality that No Country offers is quite extraordinary. Absolutely everything is rendered with stunning sharpness and clarity. What is most surprising about this is that you would expect a big-budget blockbuster film to have this sort of clarity, after all it would surely benefit more and No Country is sold on its plot, not how pretty it is. But in a film with so much silence, with so many long-shots; you appreciate the crystal-clear High Definition picture all the more. I know I did. Never has Tommy Lee Jones looked more world-weary and aged (all due respect to Mr Jones).

Almost as impressive is the sound quality. What dialogue there is, is a joy to behold and Javier Bardem (who is akin to The Terminator in a great many ways throughout this film) sounds almost unhuman, his voice so deep that it almost makes you wonder if James Earl Jones is moonlighting for the Coens. I think I felt my coffee table rattle. Again, this plays wonderfully into the film’s strengths as Tommy Lee Jones’ monologues and dialogues are given the deserved attention. Jones plays a small town sheriff, if you will the “old man” of the title, and has only been better than this once before. That time he won an Oscar and here he is almost worth the price of the disc alone.

The special features on the disc are nothing to get too excited about, the standard array of documentaries and trailers, but the film itself is. Josh Brolin (soon to play George W Bush in Oliver Stone’s W) delivers the performance of a lifetime as the desperate, quiet and good-at-heart ‘victim’ who’s trying to make a go of it. Woody Harrelson is as good as he ever is in what time he has. But really this film is about 4 men; the Coen’s have put together a wonderful film and Jones and Bardem have lived up to it. Bardem’s Anton Chighurh should go down in history along with Hannibal Lecter as one of cinema’s most disturbing psychopaths.

Get an LCD or Plasma TV, get a Blu Ray Player and watch this film the way it was meant to be seen.