Seven Psychopaths

Nobody writes dialogue and scripts as stupid as Martin McDonagh these days. This one is even more stupid, absurd (in the negative sense of the word) and clueless than In Bruges. I don’t know what this bloke’s playing at, but I reckon we’ll never be friends. If this is supposed to be some fresh, unorthodox direction in contemporary modern cinema, I, as a viewer, don't want to be part of it. Thank God for Tarantino... (01/18/2013)

Somehow I naively thought this would be a chillout movie. What I didn’t expect was that the originality would trump any consistency of the movie, and as a result, I had no idea what to think of it at all. Seven Psychopaths is a weird movie.  It’s full of great ideas, but it is hard to get into the story. Colin Farrell is the only relatively normal character in the world of Seven Psychopaths, and it felt as if he was somehow invisible in his role. It’s an irony that a man who is recovering from drinking then plays an old Irish alcoholic. I hope that this label won’t stick with him till his death. (04/25/2013)

Martin McDonagh is my favorite author, I have known that since I saw a performance of his play Orphan West at the Czech Budejovice theater. I was then very sorry that I did not have the opportunity to see the previous two plays that were also performed at the South Bohemian Theater. Specifically, these plays were "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and "The Cripple of Inishmaan." There's nothing I can do about it, maybe I will see them some other time. At least I could look forward to the film "Seven Psychopaths." More: http://www.filmovy-denik.cz/2013/02/sedm-psychopatu-2012-75.html (04/09/2013)

When the movie In Bruges appeared in movie theaters some time ago, it was a rare case where film critics agreed with film fans on the extraordinary qualities of the work and gave birth to a film where the entertaining component of the film, in the form of a darkly humorous gangster story with charismatic underworld characters, functions in close symbiosis with the dramatic existential plane, which elevates this film to the realm of film art. The director's name became known as a concept and his ego obviously strengthened because Seven Psychopaths is an ambitious work at first glance, exuding confidence and expectation of success. However, unlike In Bruges, only the first plane works here - the plane of the crazy crime story with bizarre motivations of the (anti)heroes, incredibly cool characters, and black humor based on violence. Seven Psychopaths rides the wave that was initiated in the 90s by the phenomenal success of Pulp Fiction. In fact, Martin McDonagh has made a film that is more Tarantino-like than Tarantino himself. In Bruges, he placed his characters in a real environment and endowed them with logical motivations, whereas here it is a seemingly artificial screenwriting construct that creaks and grinds wherever you look. Of course, if all the characters represent exemplary psychopaths, you can excuse all the script acrobatics and missteps by saying that nothing else can be expected from a gang of psychopaths. But I'm not satisfied with this trick. Games with genre rules were demonstrated at a much more cultivated level by Altman in his film The Player, so I have no reason to rate it higher than 2 stars. I try to perceive this film exclusively as a comedy because, in the positions of the other two genres of crime and drama, it inevitably fails. Martin McDonagh did not resist attempting a scene with philosophical insight, but considering the overall character of the film, it appears rather alien and lacks catharsis - see the culmination of the life journey of the Vietnamese killer. Overall impression: 45%. However, if you enjoy witty lines, people getting shot in the head, and overacting actors having a good time, you will not be disappointed and you can rate it much higher. (02/12/2013)

Ow! Pity half the budget was crippled by the dermatology clinic taking care of the director/screenwriter's foreskin, which was in a really underwhelming state when the script was finished, and thus the characters have to be transported to the desert for the rest of the film, where they practically just talk to each other like in some French film. I love filmmakers who try to convince me all the time that they're better than everyone else, and giving McDonagh American money to make another movie might start some kind of war. Meta-meta-meta-methadone. (07/15/2013)