Seven Psychopaths (2012) Review

This movie has to be one of the most post-modern films I have seen in quite some time. This movie is insanely self-aware, playing with the Hollywood norms, yet it pulls it off perfectly. This is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, whose first film, InBruges, I absolutely loved, so my expectations were pretty high for this. Sadly it never quite reached the level of his previous film, though still hilarious and entertaining.

The films plot is kind of hard to explain, but essentially it is about an alcoholic writer, Colin Farrel, who is writing a script called “Seven Psychopaths” however the title is all he´s got and so he interact with other psychopaths for inspiration. There is also Sam Rockwell´s character, who is the best part of the film, both acting wise and character wise, who has a business with Christopher Walken, where they kidnap dogs and return them for a reward. Those two characters are probably the ones with the most actual depth to the character, as several things are revealed about them during the film.

Now there have been a lot of comparisons between this film and Tarantino, which is very justified. McDonagh´s dialogue is very reminiscent of that of Tarantino. However I would honestly say McDonagh is doing a better job, because while Tarantino writes good and fairly witty dialogue, a lot of his dialogue often just feels unnecessary, however with McDonagh it is flat out hilarious, due to a greater emphasis on the dark British humour. However, with the massive resemblance to Tarantino, the film also has similar issues to those of Tarantino. Firstly I found the tone to be very uneven, while almost all the scenes had this great humour feel to it, there were occasional scenes that felt kind of out of place and more emotional, yet I never felt it earned that emotion. Secondly the pacing was kind of off at times and while the second half slowing down was very intentional and worked fine, the overall pacing could have been better. And as my biggest issue with Tarantino, we have the fact that some scenes just kind of lead nowhere, and there are some of those scenes here as well, though as they were hilarious it didn’t bother me as much as in Tarantino stuff.

One could argue that the writing is a tad lazy in the film, which I do kind of agree with, because while it is mostly very well written, it cheated at parts. By this I mean that it was maybe too self-aware at times poking fun at problems with the actual script, which made me think that McDonagh couldn’t really figure something out so he just refrenced it at some point in the movie, in hopes of getting away with it. That being said it is overall very well written and surprisingly unpredictable, the movie kept going in some direction where you really didn’t expect it to go.

My hopes were really high for this film and I think that may have hurt it a bit. While I found it hilarious, in a very dark way, and even some interesting characters, I ended up feeling disappointed. It is hard for me to pin-point exactly why I felt disappointed, as I was laughing so much throughout and I kept being surprised by the where the film was going. It may have been due my hopes being too high or due to me just being tired when watching it and maybe I will enjoy it as much as it seems everyone else are. Of course I didn’t dislike it any way, I was hugely entertained by it, yet I just felt something was missing for me.

3/5