Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths (2012) is about a screenwriter trying to write a screenplay called Seven Psychopaths. Marty is stuck. All he has is a title. His friend Billy makes a living stealing dogs and collecting the reward from their owners, and wants to help. Then Billy takes the wrong dog: it belongs to a mob boss, and the man genuinely loves it. The film comments on itself throughout. Marty describes the psychopaths he is writing, we see them, and then those sections bleed into the actual plot. At one point the characters argue about how the film uses its women, and that argument becomes the film's own criticism of itself. Martin McDonagh came from theatre and it shows: the scenes are built on long speeches. Christopher Walken's character is the emotional centre and his best scene is in a cemetery, with no violence in it at all. Sam Rockwell's Billy is pure chaos and carries the film's energy. Colin Farrell comes over from McDonagh's In Bruges. Tom Waits appears in a few scenes holding a rabbit. The humour is black and the violence sudden. It runs 110 minutes. Good for: black comedy, McDonagh, and metafiction. Less good for: the violence is graphic, the structure is loose, and the film plays with itself too much.