The killer in this movie spares the lives of two characters. One is the character from "Raising Arizona" who sells John Goodman diapers and is then forced to lay on the floor and count to "1000 Mississippi", the second is the aging sheriff who bookends the film. The store clerk is saved to explain that Anton doesn't kill everyone he sees. The sheriff is spared because he hasn't bothered arresting anyone in decades.
There's a scene where Anton rolls down his window and shoots at a crow on the rail of a bridge. The bullet ricochets off the bridge, and the crow gets away. Just when you think the crow scene is pointless, Woody Harrelson is introduced. He manages to get to Llewellyn's bedside in a Mexican hospital, and to spot the suitcase full of money. When he spots the money, does he climb down a path and get it? No. He goes back to the hotel for some unexplained reason. Looking back, I think I liked the crow better.
A completely inconsequential character, the arresting deputy in the beginning of the film somehow manages to get Anton in cuffs and back to the station. He is killed in more detail, over a longer period of time than anyone in movie history. The two characters we are supposed to care most about, Llewellyn and his wife, are killed off screen as if there wasn't enough time in 122 minutes to show their deaths.
The film is rife with unneeded characters. Woody Harrelson, some old fart in a wheelchair with the worst scalp ever captured on film, three tourists who after a painfully long negotiating session provide our hero with the jacket and beer he needs to get past a sleeping Mexican border guard, the sheriff's secretary who's purpose is to remember a line from a poem, a lazy, fat sheriff who laments seeing kids with green hair on the streets of Texas, and finally, two kids on bicycles with playing cards in their spokes who provide a shirt-sling vital to the film in some inconceivable way.
The high point of the film, maybe the idea the entire film is based on, is Llewellyn's review of the original shootout scene, and his subsequent tracking of the guy with the money. This scene got my hopes up for a great story. When he gets in trouble for returning to give some dope runner with a fatal gut wound a gallon of tap water, I feared the movie might be going in a stupid direction. It was. A pickup shows up in the total darkness and chases Llewellyn 200 yards to a place where the sun is up, and there's plenty of light so we can see him being chased down a river by a relentless pit bull. That's not the low point, though.
The low point was the scene where the sheriff is standing in a morgue looking at Llewellyn's dead body. There is no reason for the Sheriff to be there, since he discovered the body in the first place, and we are for some reason, finally spared seeing the results of the numbingly constant shooting in this film. Given the gory detail of the rest of the movie, it seems this scene is made for prime-time TV. I thought to myself "Of course! Llewellyn isn't dead. This is a good twist. The sheriff has reported Llewellyn's death so he can go save his wife." Well, it turns out the Coen Brothers, in their twisted sense of humor, were actually teasing. The film was over without an ending, and drug on through a funeral, another killing, an accidental car wreck with a non-character, two kids who see how many times they can say "your bone is sticking out of your arm", the painful wheelchair guy story that has absolutely no bearing on anything else, and the sheriff telling a dream story about how his dead dad is building a fire for him in heaven.
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