Seven Psychopaths
(UK, 109 min.)
Written and directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson,
Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko.
They say that the dog is man's best friend. Many a man will
do crazy things for his prized pooch. He'll talk in baby voices, walk in the
rain, or even shop for pink little bows. What happens, though, when the man who
does such silly things also happens to be crazy? Like, really crazy? Seven Psychopaths
takes one adorable pup and puts it the midst of an all-out bloodbath between a
roster of crazy nuts. Seven psychopaths, actually, as the title suggests.
Bonny is owned by one of the seven psychopaths to grace the screen. Bonny's
psychopath is Charlie (played by a hilarious Woody Harrelson), who is first
introduced as a volatile, hotheaded dog lover. With his dog-walker, Sharice (Gabby
Sidibe from Precious), handcuffed to
a chair and answering questions on the receiving end of a shiny pistol, Charlie
marks himself a true nutcase. By threatening/belittling/intimidating the
blubbering Sharice, Charlie eventually learns that Bonny may be the victim of a
dognapping scheme, which takes the film back to the script by Marty and Billy.
(Seven Psychopaths brings all its
threads together quickly.)
Charlie’s goons track the boys down when Billy holds an open
casting call to invite all the crazy killers in Hollywood to sell their stories
for the script. Joining the Jack of Diamonds among the septet of psychopaths is
a vengeful Vietnamese monk, a vigilante Quaker and a strange bunny-toting man
in black, played by Tom Waits, who is in search of his long lost wife with whom
he shared a Dexter-ish life hunting
serial killers. (The flashbacks of his romantic killing spree are among the
film’s highlights.)
The best psychopath, though, is obviously the one played by
Christopher Walken. In a spot-on bit of casting, Walken plays Rockwell's dognapping
partner, a philosophizing, cravat-wearing, and peyote-tripping psychopath.
Walken delivers all sorts of hilariously twisted proverbs and musings in his
signature kooky dead pan. It’s his best role in about ten years and he almost
steals the show from Bonny.
As the psychopaths converge in the desert for their
inevitable showdown, which is riotously played out within the creative riffing
for Marty's script, they unleash a furious bloodbath through the streets of Los
Angeles. In an ultra-funny and ultra-violent ensemble piece, the wildly
original Seven Psychopaths plays much
like a hybrid crime-comedy by Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and the Coen
Brothers. Seven Psychopaths is written
and directed by Martin McDonagh, the same crazy individual who made the 2008
crime-comedy hit In Bruges. Psychopaths is as hilarious as Bruges is, but it’s even more deranged.
Like In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths is a man's movie. A
proverbial sausage-fest of psychopaths, the film has a flagrant disregard for
the female sex (and self-ironically so), as all the ladies of the film deliver
a token line before they are shot, bumped off, or meet some form of foul death.
Perhaps even in a wet T-shirt if viewers are lucky. The women of Seven Psychopaths are passive pieces of
eye candy that are mere obstacles to the films true heroine, Bonny. Bitches.
Darkly funny and perversely violent, Seven Psychopaths takes splat-n-chuckle mayhem to the seventh degree. Bullets fly and bodies pile up in McDonagh's irreverent bloodbath, but Seven Psychopaths is no dumb action flick. It's a smart and self-aware spoof, a love letter to the Midnight Madness written, etched onto the back of a dead hooker, or something f*cked up and morbid like that. It's no wonder that a genre film as fun and as self-reflexive as Seven Psychopaths nabbed the People's Choice Award for the Midnight Madness Programme when it premiered at TIFF earlier this fall. Any film that features Christopher Walken enjoying a drug induced epiphany in the desert is worthy of a prize.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Seven Psychopaths opens in theatres Friday, Oct. 12 from Alliance
Films.
