Film: Seven Psychopaths

Director: Martin McDonagh
Genre: Comedy
Source: USA (2012)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Blu-Ray
Grade: B+

Sometimes movies are marketed completely wrong. The previews for Seven Psychopaths did absolutely nothing for me. I thought it looked stupid and unappealing. Yet somehow it ended up at the top of my Netflix queue. And I'm really glad it did.

That said, I'm not sure how you market this movie differently. Perhaps make a bigger deal for fans of In Bruges (which I was not aware was made by the same filmmaker until right before I put the movie in to watch). Perhaps play less of the "psychopaths" and more of the witty dialogue, which seemed to get short shrift in the ads (which were much more concerned with counting up the numbers). Perhaps it's just a terrible title in general, which I would not dispute.

What you actually get with this movie is the same sort of witty, thoughtful, and absurdist violence that you got with the director's first film. There are shades of Tarantino--in the layered storytelling, in the nonlinear timeframe, in the poppy dialogue. I don't think McDonagh is as accomplished as Tarantino at his best, but he's also not nearly as self-congratulating or narcissistic as Tarantino at his worst, so the result is an entertaining and surprisingly touching meditation on violence, its uses, and its abuses. 

It helps that the actors here are all so dang entertaining. Farrell, Walken, and Rockwell seem to genuinely be having fun here, and that goes a long way to making the movie so enjoyable, especially with the witty exchanges that they share. The movie itself is self-critical and reflexive on what violence means in the movies versus real life, even as then it consciously plays out movie violence on an extreme scale. "What if" the characters repeatedly ask, "the movie went this way instead of that way? Or do we want the traditional Hollywood ending?" And while I'm being slightly facetious--this isn't Deadpool-levels of absurdity where the character knows he's in a comic book (or in this case a movie)--but it is close, as one of the characters is a screenwriter writing down these events, or perhaps fictionalizing them, or perhaps not. By the end it even creates a few nice questions about what we want out of art--meaning? Titillation? Illusion?--which I was not expecting as the film opens.

This isn't a perfect film by any stretch. But I was pleased that it was so much more than I expected, and something I wouldn't be disappointed to watch again.

Still, terrible title.

Alternate Film Title: "Pretty Much Anything Would Be Better Than Seven Psychopaths"