Movie, starring Tommy Lee jones, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem

Set in the late 1970's, early 80's, this is was an unsettling movie. Set in far west Texas, it tells a story of a Vietnam vet living with his wife in a ratty trailer park. One day the vet (Brolin) goes out in the desert to hunt elk. He looks through his scope and aims at an elk and misses, but sees something odd. A big bruiser of a dog, (a pit bull I think) is limping through the dust. Brolin walks down into the valley and finds several pickups all shot up and dead men lying on the ground. He opens one pickup door and a dying man asks for "agua." Brolin says I don't have any water, and keeps walking and looking.

He comes upon a dead man with a case nearby. He opens the case and finds it packed with stacks of cash. He takes the case and goes home and hides the case underneath the trailer, and tells his wife she won't have to work anymore. Then he fills a gallon jug with water, and leaving his puzzled wife, goes back to the desert looking for the dying man. Suddenly two trucks roar into the night and Brolin runs for his life and gets away--but the thugs get his license plate number. Then an enforcer played by Bardem, starts tracking him down.

Bardem is a psychopath, creepy, cold and implacable, scarier than Hannible Lecter. He is a giant of a man with a bowl haircut. Sometimes he plays with people he's about to kill by flipping a coin and asks them to call heads or tails. If they get it right they are spared--sometimes.
Brolin takes the case and checks into a motel and hides the case in an air duct on the wall. Bardem is always right behind, and he has a peculiar murder weapon. He has a pneumatic weapon that requires an O2 tank to power it, and that fires slugs as big as a fat mans thumb. It is used to kill cattle in slaughterhouses, but makes an awful weapon to kill people and to shoot out locks on doors-the slug fires a round hole right through it.
It's only as Brolin moves from one motel to another ahead of Bardem that he unloads the money out of the case and finds a tracking device buried in the money. Bardem has already been to Brolin's trailer and picked up a piece of mail-- the phone bill, and starts calling people on the list.

Brolin and Bardem encounter one another and exchange gunfire--both are wounded but limp away. Brolin throws the money case off a sidewalk onto the brushy banks of the Rio Grande.

The old men of the title are the lawmen, including Tommy Lee Jones, who are incredulous of the drug activity and horror and death that the trade has brought with it. A new day of violence is upon them.
The movie was gruesome and ends badly for all concerned. It was thoroughly depressing.
One thing I'll say--the casting director used real people as actors in all but the starring roles, and they had authentic accents.

But the movie was too long and badly needed editing down, but it was interesting.

susil