Running time 122 minutes

There’s a biblical dimension to Joel and Ethan Coen’s thriller that gives it the texture of an epic myth. The opening scene in the West Texas desert is a gripper. A local cowboy called Moss stumbles across the remains of a drug deal that’s gone very wrong. The pickup trucks are riddled with bullet holes. Blood has congealed on the windscreens. The bodies are attracting flies. Moss leaves the container of heroin and walks off with the suitcase stuffed with two million dollars. This piece of opportunism sets up a bloody chase to get the money back.

The Coens are consummate scene-setters. Their most memorable characters are chipped from the savage, empty landscapes they favour; and so it is here. Josh Brolin’s lugubrious cowboy is a salt-of-the-earth local. So too is Tommy Lee Jones’s veteran sheriff who picks up the pieces. But there’s nothing quaint about the violence that follows Moss. This is not the kind of wild Old West that the Coen brothers painted in Blood Simple. Times – indeed the genre itself – have moved. This is the deep point.

The hitman who comes after Moss is an avenging angel, a force of nature who wanders around with a cylinder of gas and a bolt gun to open doors and dispatch people who cross his path. Javier Bardem plays this unstoppable satanic figure with a single-mindedness that is almost comical. He has a terrifying 1960s moptop. Occasionally he allows an unsuspecting garage attendant to “call it” on the toss of a coin. The nervous humour is that the luckless attendant doesn’t have a clue what he’s calling, or why. That is the mystery of Bardem’s inscrutable killer. You’re never entirely convinced that he is hunting Moss just to retrieve the money.

An astonishing amount of carnage ensues. The three main male figures chase each other around various motels in bleak and beautiful landscapes that reflect their state of minds. Cormac McCarthy’s novel is a ripe target for vintage Coen mischief. But the artistic merits of their pitch-black existential thriller are elusive. The film creaks with deep significance, but I’m not convinced they have reinvented a genre.

Kelly Macdonald is terrific as Moss’s trailer-trash wife with a heart of gold. Woody Harrelson delivers an icy cameo as a corrupt private investigator. And Jones is in his element as the sheriff who doesn’t miss a trick but fails to understand the big picture. In a sense, the film is a lament for old certainties which are cruelly swept aside, perhaps purged would be more accurate, by Bardem’s extraordinary monster.

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