As timeless as they are, it’s been awhile since we shared a long cultural embrace with Western motifs. Neither thematic implication (nor McCarthy’s return to the vicious frontier pragmatism of No Country For Old Men) are the only reasons this all seems so familiar. Taken at individual face value, you could also mistake any scene of The Counselor’s title sequence, without immediate context, as a stand-in opener kicking off a lost episode of Breaking Bad.

Appreciable identifications aside — Breaking Bad’s often detached intros were similarly incongruous for a show ostensibly dramatizing a Southwestern meth empire — it’s through Vince Gilligan’s crime series that the American consciousness has enjoyed its longest-lasting relationship with the Western in years. The amoral, often despicable chemistry teacher-turned-druglord Walter White is a modern-day cattle rustler if ever there was one, and fans reveled in his self-serving and increasingly drastic machinations.

There’s a reason this all seems so familiar.

“There is gold in the streets,” Walt rapaciously lectures early in the show’s final season, shortly after detonating a pipe bomb in a nursing home to rub out his former-boss-cum-opposition. “Just waiting for someone to come and scoop it up.” For the average viewer, watching Walt take back his raison d’etre after years of spineless existence in suburban hell was the perfect vicarious escape.

More thrilling than your life, isn’t it?

There’s a kindred sense of seizing one’s destiny (and underlying greed) that runs through The Counselor, which follows an unnamed lawyer’s one-time foray into the underworld of drug trafficking. While McCarthy is well-versed in this kind of territory it still feels like a Breaking Bad reverberation, something fans have sought out in various forms since the series finale in September. The Counselor’s El Paso-Juárez split may as well be Walt’s Albuquerque, its coke meth. The film itself is small and violent enough to play out exactly like a self-contained episode.

That hasn’t kept the film from facing a confused, somewhat tepid reception. Critics have mostly tripped over McCarthy’s bizarre, meandering dialogue, which slips in and out of cynical existential soliloquy at random and invokes more dramaturgy than straight screenwriting. Yet despite its dense script and unconventional approach to well-worn subject matter (you won’t really grasp what’s going on until almost an hour into the film), marketing expectations bill The Counselor as a fairly straightforward thriller from an A-list director.

Instead of Breaking Bad you get something closer to a drug trade documentary. The Counselor’s progression is a spare, slow build, with much of its plot taking place merely in conversation rather than Hollywoodized action. It all goes wrong very quickly, as a miscommunication leads to a missing shipment of cocaine (that sounds more benign than it is), which riles up some pissed off Mexican cartel. When the film’s savagery finally kicks its execution is graphic and joyless. Scott’s slick camerawork notwithstanding, there’s no room for escape here.

Coincidence.

That #HaveYouBeenBad hashtag the film’s marketing team used also misled expectations, taking advantage of what’s essentially a throwaway line in what certainly can’t be a coincidental echo of Walt’s world. The Counselor is what would happen if someone tried to break bad outside of Gilligan’s writer’s room, and its expectedly brutal consequences are probably a reflection of why no one seems to like it much.

Michael Fassbender’s Counselor himself is basically the antithesis of Walter White. Walt’s chemistry knowledge and ingenuity seem expertly suited for a life of crime, his Machiavellian manipulations and quick thinking making for highly entertaining television.

The Counselor is conversely much less prepared to involve himself in the drug trade, even on a temporary basis. He only knows the business from a legal end, and is more or less blind as to what could happen if things don’t go smoothly. It sounds easy, but then it always does: a single in-and-out deal with Reiner, Javier Bardem’s shady nightclub owner and the Counselor’s underworld connection, that’ll to make life perfect for his new fiancé, Laura.

Nor does the Counselor really even seem to need the money. Although he tells Reiner he’s financially “against the wall,” neither Scott nor McCarthy gives any notion of the details, let alone the Counselor’s struggle.

The Counselor gets involved in some shady dealings. How would you do?

We do get outward appearances. The Counselor has a country club membership, a GQ-spread closet full of impeccably cut suits and the kind of modern, minimal living space that few experience outside of the movies. Early in the film he flies to Amsterdam, diamond shopping for Laura’s engagement ring. When said deal he’s using to finance his happiness goes south, he quietly goes to pieces, completely out of his element.

Unlike Walt, the Counselor is nearly a blank slate. Fassbender plays him with a nonchalance and an air of smug-if-subtle control, though McCarthy never really affords him any. Accordingly the film doesn’t give the audience any connection — or any release, either.

There’s no room for escape here.

The Counselor is warned off more than once, essentially being told flat out this is a bad idea. In the scripted realm of television, it can be hard to shake the feeling that there’s always some narrative trap door the protagonist can take to flee from harm. Whenever it mattered for the sake of tension, Gilligan gave Walt that. McCarthy isn’t so merciful.

“What do you think I should do?” the Counselor asks Reiner late in the film, desperate for some guidance in shark-infested waters. “I don’t know, Counselor,” Reiner says. “I don’t know.”

Variations of this conversation appear multiple times throughout McCarthy’s script, echoing what any average law-abiding upper-middle-to-upper class citizen might say or do if they were in the Counselor’s shoes. For most, the outcome would probably be the same.

Same difference.

Interestingly, nearly everyone in The Counselor seems as clueless as Fassbender. Bardem’s ostentatious, affable Reiner is oddly harmless — he’s afraid of his lover (Cameron Diaz, more or less playing the younger sister to Kristen Scott Thomas’ character in Only God Forgives [NSFW]) and doesn’t even seem capable of skirting the law, even when he’s casually discussing horrifying instruments of death.

Westwray, Brad Pitt’s smooth talking Western-wear middleman, somehow believes he isn’t implicated, even after the Counselor is. Both Reiner and Westwray end up dead, the latter in an excruciating motorized bolo-piano wire-esque device that, if it’s not just a product of McCarthy’s imagination probably should be.

And the Counselor himself? He ends up paralyzed with fear, holed up in Mexico after Laura is taken by the Cartel. One night he gets a package with a DVD that says “Hola!” on it—you can guess the unwatched contents. McCarthy leaves the Counselor’s ultimate fate a question mark, but either way it’s pretty bleak.

Even the smartest men can be fools.

Another somewhat ponderous crime film marketed as a thriller, 2012’s Killing Them Softly, received an analogous response. It didn’t have Breaking Bad’s sensibilities either. Not even close.

Hey, it’s Hank!

Here the Western iconography is maybe a little too close to Breaking Bad’s Albuquerque (we even get a cameo from Dean Norris as a Hank-ish character, only acting on Walt’s side). If Gilligan’s take on the genre was free license to run rampant through the criminal unknown, The Counselor’s is a bullet to the head. Compared to Walt, the Counselor proves that even the smartest men can be fools.

“The best westerns are about man against his own landscape,” Scott recently told the New York Times in an interview for the film. Sometimes for the audience that landscape is an ugly mirror.