No Country For Old Men, the latest film by Joel and Ethan Coen, adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy, uses the cliché of Hollywood movies of ‘the hunter becoming the hunted’. It relies heavily on the original work of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy and is a film where the bad guys don't quite get what's coming to them.

It's all at the American dream ---any penniless guy born in a broken-down shack can, through grit and hard work, one day become Bill Gates. It’s a free country! Opportunities unlimited! No Country for Old Men, tis splash of cold reality. It’s very simple. You play with a drug cartel by taking their money--- making off with two million dollars in drug money-- and they're going to blow your head blown off with a cattle gun. The blue-collar worker, who is up against the men with the big money, loses badly. There's dark blood spreading on the floor everywhere.

In Killing Joke: The Coen brothers’ twists and turns in the New Yorker David Denby observes:

The movie is essentially a game of hide-and-seek, set in brownish, stained motel rooms and other shabby American redoubts, but shot with a formal precision and an economy that make one think of masters like Hitchcock and Bresson....But, in the end, the movie’s despair is unearned—it’s far too dependent on an arbitrarily manipulated plot and some very old-fashioned junk mechanics. “No Country” is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness.