With a title such as this, I should have known that the
movie would be filled with comic book violence intended often to be funny in
the same way Pulp Fiction was funny--and I hated Pulp Fiction.
The film centers around Marty (Colin
Farrell) who is trying to write a screenplay about seven psychopaths with the help of his friend Billy
(Sam Rockwell) an actor who steals dogs for a living. Billy with his friend Hans
(Christopher Walken) returns the dogs to distraught owners for money. Hans has a
fairly complicated back story and he eventually becomes one of the seven who help Marty write his story. Billy has already stolen a Shih Tzu belonging to
mob boss Charlie (Woody Harrelson), and quickly the film becomes a chase film with Harrelson
pursuing the trio and killing many along the way.
The premise becomes a chance for the real screenwriter to
tell several different stories and tie them all together. While Rockwell’s
character is constantly manic and over the top much of the film, Farrell and
Walken become much more interesting to watch and actually elicited sympathy
from me. While the whole thing is on the coyote-roadrunner level of shock and
violence, I found it difficult to laugh at Hans’ gentle wife being shot in the
head and another of the psychopath’s being shot in the stomach and then treated as a great joke that she takes a long time to die.
I was not a fan
of the Pulp Fiction approach to shocking the audience with violence to get them to laugh, and I did not appreciate it here.
By the end of the film I was highly conflicted. I
appreciated the many jokes in the script and constant use of irony, loathed the senseless feel of violence, and
after analysis, found myself unable to recommend the film to any of my friends.
Perhaps my response is purely a generational response, because I find too much
violence in our world as it is. Do we really need gratuitous violence to laugh
at, which implies that life has no meaning in the world?
Seven Pyschopaths (2012) ***
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