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The Coen brothers are brilliant, unstoppably cool artists, and that's why "No Country For Old Men" is a mixed bag. I walked away from it in awed disappointment.

The film is wonderfully acted, shot and edited, flush with rich detail. Smart. Nuanced. What it's not, though, is all that entertaining.

This is no fault of Javier Bardem's. He's the greatest thing about this flick, and his Anton Chigurh is a psychotic villain for the ages. Charged with reclaiming millions in lost cash, he has two weapons of choice for extricating victims' brain matter — a cattle gun powered by a tank of air and a silenced shotgun.

These two tools of death are blunt, whisper quiet and strike suddenly — just like The Man himself. His stunted gait and measured, precise way of walking bring to mind Michael Meyers in the original Halloween. Chigurh's presence is no less ominous.

The Coens' fingerprints are all over this nut. He's got a stupid haircut and a strange way of speaking. Plus, he's an aggravating jerk on top of being a nihilistic murder machine. He likes to mess with people's heads, repeating questions and seizing on opportunities to make the West Texans who inhabit this movie feel stupid.

His early encounter with a gas station attendant he calls "Friend-o" is so awkward it'll make you cringe. And he doesn't even kill the guy, just forces him to call heads or tails on a coin flip without explaining why (it's actually a pretty terrifying little situation).

We're introduced to Chigurh before the plot — such as it is — kicks in. A mustachioed Texan with the fun name Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, who's been on fire lately) stumbles onto a drug deal gone wrong, finds $2 million in cash and decides to take it for himself. Soon, Chigurh's hunting him down, punching out door locks and frontal lobes with his cattle gun as he follows a trail that becomes increasingly and strikingly bloody.

There's a lot of blood in "No Country," and the Coens have always been masters of making it bite. Their blood is redder than other directors' (except perhaps David Cronenberg) and blacker, too, because of their films' odd tones. (Remember the hand getting stabbed in "Blood Simple"? Or Steve Buchemi's guts spilling out of a wood chipper into the snow in "Fargo"? Same thing.)

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) goes chasing after both men, and his many scenes are where the film lets up its grip. He's a homely guy who misses the older days, when folks had more manners. He wonders when the world got so crazy. He's a smart man, but boring too, which is the point.

But his drabness being the point doesn't make it any less so. The plot — the chase — ultimately doesn't matter. It never satisfies like a typical chase flick might try to, and that's the point, too.

But again . . .

I wanted a Coens' movie like "Fargo," indisputably one of the five-or-so best films of the past 25 years. "No Country" has the brilliantly hokey characters and smart, sweeping visual style of that masterpiece, but the story lacks momentum. The plot ultimately goes nowhere.

In "Fargo" we follow the characters' tragic, funny or disturbing fates, and can't help but care what happens next. "No Country For Old Men" basically tells us not to.

And by doing this, it loses something crucial: consequence.