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         A movie’s theme is the most important feature for me.  Now if you go for good acting, this movie has it.  Real life dialogue like you are there–it has it.  Stark reality with the characters caught in the clutches of naturalistic mayhem–it’s got it.  Cinematography depicting the barren, endless South Texas landscape and thus a symbol of the characters lives–impeccable.  You like suspense?  It literally moves your body around in your seat. 

     And I like all these aspects of the motion picture art.  But when the credits rolled, I found myself smothered by a cloud of hopelessness.  This picture could have been called No Hope for Any Man.

     For hopelessness is the theme and heart of this picture.  It shows how an average Joe played by Josh Brolin, a welder, gets sucked into the greedy world of drugs and money.  While hunting out in the wasteland for deer, He stumbles onto a drug deal gone bad.  Dead men, dead dogs, and dead pickup trucks lie strewn about on the desert floor, all riddled with bullets.  One truck is loaded with bricks of cocaine.  And then he finds another man with the suitcase full of bundles of hundreds–$2,000,000 to be exact.

     So he takes it and runs.  The drug syndicate bosses dispatch an absolute madman assassin after him, and you are left clutching the armrests of your chair as you begin to swim in the wake of the bloodletting that entails.

     Old Sheriff Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is overwhelmed by the dozens of murders in his jurisdiction.  He has spent his life keeping the peace.  Over coffee, he and another old lawman lament this new day of violence that has overtaken them.  They call it “the evil tide” that’s washing over America.  And their faces say it all.  “It’s hopeless.  The evil is flooding over our society like a scourge.  Where is God in all this?”

     In his despair, Tommy Lee Jones says at one point, “I thought that when I got old, God would come into my life, but He hasn’t.”  Those of an older time in America remember a more innocent day.  Now it has become no country for these old men. 

     And so it went.  The crazy bounty hunter murders at will unabated, symbolizing how evil in this country grows and no one or nothing can stop it.  He walks away scott-free, no one around, at the end of the picture. 

     But I’ve got news for the Coen brothers who wrote and directed this film.  There is hope.  All signs point to our King Jesus Christ returning to this earth in our lifetime.  And he will come back and terminate the evildoers and he will staunch the evil tide of this world system.  He will establish a government of true righteousness, justice, and judgement. 

     He will dry the tears from every eye; He will exalt His followers who have crucified their selfish hearts and walked with Him in a newness of life; He will hold and comfort all who mourn.  He will heal the afflicted; He’ll give “beauty for ashes,” for the evil will lie in ashes, and His sons and daughters shall shine as they sing His words:  “In the world you shall have tribulation.  But be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.”  And by believing that He dwells and abides in us, we overcome the world, also (John 16:33; I John 5:4)                                                Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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