Review #922: 'Seven Psychopaths' (2012)

Even though I wasn't blown away by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's directorial debut, In Bruges (2008), the film contained enough memorable one-liners and great performances to have me anticipating his next feature. In the four years that elapsed between In Bruges and his follow-up Seven Psychopaths, Martin's brother John Michael wrote and directed the offensively hilarious The Guard (2011), and in 2014 gave us Calvary, one of the truly great films of that year. Martin's limelight has been stolen somewhat, and Seven Psychopaths is a slight let-down. It's a movie about movies, or rather a movie within a movie, or even a movie without a movie - either way, it's a bit of a mess.

Script-writer Marty (Colin Farrell) has writer's block. He knows what his next movie is going to be called - Seven Psychopaths - but the title is all he has. Struggling with alcoholism, he tries to keep his girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish) happy while his unhinged best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) tries to worm his way into a writing credit. Looking to avoid creating yet another movie glamorising violence, he wants his psychopaths to retain some humanity and have the message of his movie be about peace and love. Billy suggests he takes inspiration from the 'Jack of Diamonds' killer, who only kills high-ranking mobsters and is currently on a killing spree in Los Angeles, and they take an ad out in the local paper asking for real-life psychopaths to come and tell their story.

Billy also kidnaps dogs from rich folk for a living along with his partner-in-crime Hans (Christopher Walken), but they have just stolen a Shih Tzu from the wrong man - gangster and madman Charlie (Woody Harrelson) - a man we first meet trying to fix his gun so he can shoot the young girl who had the dog in her care in the face. Marty has the vaguest of ideas about his other psychopaths - one being a Vietnamese war veteran (Long Nguyen) dressed as a priest looking to avenge his family's murder during the war, and another a quaker (Harry Dean Stanton) who stalks his daughter's killer for decades - but no way of connecting them and one story possibly accidentally stolen. With Charlie on their tail, Marty, Billy and Hans flee to the desert to contemplate their fate and finish the script once and for all.

This is an odd film from start to finish. The opening scene depicts two gangster (Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt) discussing famous murders of people being shot through the eyeball, before being blown away themselves by the masked Jack of Diamonds killer, It's reminiscent of the Tarantino-inspired wave of self-aware crime flicks of the 1990's, where pop-culture references and quirky humour trumped anything dark and serious. The use of freeze-frames to introduce it's collection of psychopaths also reminded me of the 1990's, when Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996) opened the floodgates for countless inferior imitators in Britain to do the very same. Are these the kinds of movies McDonagh was offered in the wake of a successful debut and is now satirising them? Or did he just run out of ideas and resort to emulating a now-dated era?

I found this the main problem with Seven Psychopaths, and I felt like I could never be sure if McDonagh was being smart, lazy, or both in an ironic clever-clever way. At the half-way point, the film begins to drag and meander as if McDonagh had genuine writer's block (there's a reason the main character is Irish and called Marty) but kept writing in the hope that it would eventually work itself out. But Seven Psychopaths does have moments of inspiration. As Hans, Christopher Walken makes the welcome return to the large roles that seem to have evaded him of late, and delivers a performance of real humanity. The dialogue too, is as quotable and vicious as you would expect from the man who penned In Bruges, with the humour providing a welcome distraction from the barrage of exhaustive violence - and maybe that's the point. But whatever the point, this will more likely leave you scratching your head trying to figure it out.


Directed by: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko, Abbie Cornish, Harry Dean Stanton
Country: UK

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie