Seven Psychopaths (2012)
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Seven Psychopaths Movie Review
Seven Psychopaths is a 2012 crime comedy film directed by Martin McDonagh and starring Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken. It’s an interesting, but uneven experiment.
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“Yeah, it’s a hard world for women,
but most of the ones I know can string a sentence together“
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This movie has a very interesting storyline of friends trying to write a crime movie screenplay only to get involved in the crime themselves. The blurring of fiction and reality was interesting, albeit difficult to understand at times. The entire film’s just partially a successful experiment as many of its scenes do not work, but many also do which makes it solid but flawed.
I found it to be too much of a violent crime flick instead of a comedy film and that bothered me as I prefer the second genre. I did find the humor very funny at times as Rockwell’s character can be pretty funny and the scenes with Shih Tzu were all hilarious. The same goes for the friends making fun of their screenplay and movies. The film definitely features quite sophisticated dialogue.
I also really liked the characters and their friendship was strong and imbued by many memorable and amusing interactions. Colin Farrell’s quite likable here and he definitely gave another strong performance being such an underrated actor. Christopher Walken also is surprisingly likable and interesting in this film and I also really liked the film’s villains.
The director surely likes Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell as he chose them both again for ‘Three Billboards’ which is a much better film than this one. Woody was somewhat underutilized, but Sam is quite funny and fun with many hilarious lines of dialogue.
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Seven Psychopaths is well shot and scored and I also found its pacing solid, though the structure is troublesome as the film is difficult to comprehend at times and is even sometimes too different, weird and unappealing. I would definitely liken Martin McDonagh’s style of directing to those of Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin as most critics have already pinpointed, but at this point of his career, he needed more discipline. But I will say that he is a very authentic, different director.
Seven Psychopaths features memorable characters, pretty good humor, very good performances from its strong cast and a very original storyline and style, but it is only a partially successful experiment as it just didn’t work in some scenes, it was occasionally difficult to comprehend and the crime elements were overwhelming as opposed to underutilized comedy elements.
