Movie Review: Seven Psychopaths (2012)

I have been a fan of Martin McDonaugh since I first saw The Beauty Queen of Leenane at a theatre in San Diego in 2000. Adept at catchy, rhythmic dialogue, delving into the blackness of the human spirit, and dark comedy that masterfully swims through the postmodern mist while maintaining some semblance of the emotional and intellectual strength of modernism and even classic Irish theatre, his work is sometimes breathtaking. I later saw two other plays of his and came to consider him as the greatest playwright of his generation. When he moved to film with first the Academy Award winning Six Shooter short and then the small budget In Bruges (2008), he showed his mastery transcended theatre alone, at it was a lovely, though extremely violent entry with great acting, dialogue and clever storytelling on a small scale. 

So it was with great anticipation that I sat down to watch Seven Psychopaths after somehow missing it in the theatre. What I got instead was a mess that appeared both too ambitious and too insular to  succeed. There was still snappy dialogue, clever repartee between characters, dark tales of violence, revenge and redemption couched within humor that provide insight into the universal themes of humanity, and compelling characters. Yet in his attempt to deconstruct Hollywood film within a film, a postmodernist metatext technique, he seemed to forget that compelling storytelling needs compelling characters, compelling dialogue and a compelling visual text. Seven Psychopaths instead feels like an Eisenstein montage without the deeper conjunctures or central narrative thrust. 

The film centers on the exploits of three men: Marty (Colin Farrell), a screenwriting struggling with his latest screeenplay not-so-ironically called Seven Psychopaths, Billy (Sam Rockwell), a man making a living stealing dogs and collecting rewards and his partner Hans (Christopher Walken), whose wife is in a hospital dying of cancer. Marty lives in a plush LA apartment with his beautiful girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish), but is struggling to follow up his earlier success and spending most of his time drinking, smoking and doing anything but writing. Billy seems lost and we soon learn is one of the seven psychopaths of the film as is Hans, who cut his own throat to meet the man who killed his wife in hell. The film starts with two killers awaiting their prey on a bridge talking about shooting someone in the eye. As they prepare to execute their job, they are shot from behind by a man in a mask. That same man later kills two killers sent to retrieve the beloved dog of another psychopath, the gangster Charlie (Woody Harrelson). We soon learn that Billy is the masked killer, when he inexplicably kills Charlie's girlfriend, who has been having an affair with. The trio set out for the desert to escape Charlie, who has killed Hans' wife in the interim, and a final shootout is in the offing.

The film has its moments and some of the stories do resonate with their examination of the darker side of human motivation and desire, the eroticism of violence and the lengths we will go for love -- whether it be friendship, romantic love or for man's best friend. But the acting, particularly of Sam Rockwell, is over the top, the dialogue too often seems purposefully absurd and superficial, and the attempt to deconstruct the text while it unfolds on the screen falls flat. While Charlie Kaufman pulled this feat off spectacularly in Adaptation (2002), McDonaugh  gets lost in the midst of the pomo game, failing to recognize the Noir works best in simple, staccato scenes, lithe dialogue and truly compelling characters. He should have spent more time watching Quentin Tarantino, who could have probably spiced up this script in a few days, or maybe hours instead of creating what appears to be a mixture of Natural Born Killers and any B-movie about Hollywood made in the past 20 years. McDonaugh will surely return with something more tailored to his unique talents, but this was a disappointing film that I was surprised to find many ciritics lauding ... C+.