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United Kingdom 2012
Directed by
Martin McDonagh
109 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3.5 stars

Seven Psychopaths

Synopsis:  Marty (Colin Farrell) is a scriptwriter suffering from writer's block. He’s got the title "Seven Psychopaths", but wants to turn the ultra-violent genre on its head by giving it a "pacifist" twist. When his best friend, Billy (Sam Rockwell), steals the dog of a bad-ass gangster (Woody Harrelson) in order to collect the reward money, Marty finds himself in something that looks very much like his own screenplay gone horribly wrong.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh follows up his 2008 black crime comedy In Bruges with another, even blacker, crime comedy, re-teaming with his leading man from the earlier film, Colin Farrell.  

Seven Psychopaths is a cleverly-conceived, well-executed film with a cast that will draw genre cultists like flies to a barbeque. Aside from the always-watchable Farrell, there’s Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits, all of whom give excellent performances, as well as a wordless cameo from Harry Dean Stanton. This casting is as knowing as the script which is a parodic commentary on the male-dominated Hollywood addiction to senseless killing as entertainment. And yet for all its cleverness and hipness, the film tends to get mired in same screen brutality of which it makes fun.  

It takes quite a while to warm to McDonagh’s film, the blood splattering occurring too often to get over-enthused about. Then, as the duality of the story starts to show through and Marty's life starts to look like a movie script you are able to relax and parenthesize it as a playful deconstruction of crime film mechanics. Rockwell’s pitching of the “final gun battle” to Farrell and Walken is a very funny concatenation of the genre's clichés and there are peppered throughout the film some wryly amusing moments.

Frankly, however, other than the snappy life-follows-art conceit there’s not a lot in McDonagh’s film that Quentin Tarantino didn’t do with greater élan in Pulp Fiction nearly 20 years ago and that has been riffed upon many times since. But at least what it does do it does well and for its cast, and if you don’t mind plenty of graphic blood-letting, Seven Psychopaths is worth the punt.

 

 

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