As his characters in The Fugitive, Men In Black and, um, Men In Black 2 have shown time and time again, Tommy Lee Jones is not a man to be messed with.

So when the producers of No Country For Old Men started to muck around with Tommy Lee Jones’ salary, it was always going to end up with one of two scenarios – either Tommy Lee Jones was going to chase them through the woods with a gang of fearsome US Marshalls until they’re forced to jump off a waterfall, or he’d just sue them.

So he sued them. Tommy Lee Jones has launched a lawsuit against the producers of No Country For Old Men because he says they paid him $10 million less than they said they would. $10 million is lot of money which, having seen No Country For Old Men, equates roughly to $5 million for every word that Tommy Lee Jones spoke in it, so no wonder he’s narked off.

No Country For Old Men was a phenomenal success. Not only did it win just about every movie award under the sun, but it also ended up taking hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, which is fairly odd for an almost-silent movie about a man with a funny haircut getting some kids to bandage him up with a T-shirt.

The success of No Country For Old Men has led to greater things for everyone involved – Javier Bardem got to have it off with Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz at the same time, Josh Brolin’s getting to play the president in his next movie and it lent Woody Harrelson the authority to compare Wesley Snipes to a tree in official letters.

Yep, everyone’s done well out of No Country For Old Men, except for Tommy Lee Jones. He’s apparently been gypped out of $10 million by the movie’s producers, after he apparently signed a contract where they promised him all kinds of woolly fluff. BBC News reports:

Legal papers filed in California stated the 61-year-old had taken a lower fee than normal to appear in the film. But Paramount Pictures pledged “significant” bonuses to him if the movie was a hit and Jones did not receive these, the papers alleged.

Significant bonuses? No wonder there’s so much confusion – that doesn’t actually mean anything at all. Personally if we were the movie producers, we’d have tried to let Tommy Lee Jones keep the hat he wore and one of the dog corpse dummies from the film on the basis that they’re culturally significant. Plus, you know, he might have been able to get a couple of quid for them on eBay as well. What’s he complaining for?

Actually, in fairness, we’re completely on the side of Tommy Lee Jones here. It’s not nice to go unrewarded for work you’ve done, especially when you’ve already been rewarded for it and you’re quibbling over bonuses for your particularly easy, incredibly overpaid role in a movie that basically just asked you to play a quieter version of every single other character you’ve played in all other movies you’ve ever been in.

Honestly Tommy Lee Jones, we should organise a march for you or something.