The Coen Bros’ next movie promises to be a break from their recent output and actually be good – it’s an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel No Country for Old Men, a modern day Western. Here’s the plot, courtesy of Publishers Weekly:
In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who’s taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex–Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss’s whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there’s a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match.
The cast is already great – Tommy Lee Jones stars, along with Javier Bardem and the thespian of his generation, Josh Brolin – and now it’s getting better. Woody Harrelson has joined the cast, as has Stephen Root. Root’s returning for a third go-round with the Coens; he also worked for them on O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Ladykillers.