It doesn't want to be the Lock-Stock-ish bruto-comedy for which it was billed in American markets. That is, in fact, the film's central conundrum: a world-weary Irish screenwriter exiled in L.A. is suffering writer's block. He has the title, 7 Psychopaths, but is tired of writing violence,-- is, in fact, sufffering an uncharacteristic attraction to pacifism.
As the title suggests, it is less a unified effort than a picaresque story-book telling psychopathic tales. Not even full tales, but half-tales, as our squeamish scribe can hardly bear to let them come to their fruition. This embryonic state opens space for a complexity that is rare in the genre, and although much about the movie is frustrating, it offers powerful moments of melancholy along with its (slightly weary but often effective) humor.
Because the screenwriter is a hardly-veiled version of McDonagh himself, the movie is free to address its own flaws, as when the Christopher Walken psychopath reads the screenplay and complains that the women have nothing interesting to say, indeed, seem to be there only to die violently. (In one of the funnier self-knowing nods, the Sam Rockwell psychopath, who frequently holds a gun to the head of the Woody Harrelson psychopath's kidnapped shih-tzu, points out that you're not allowed to kill animals in movies, only women.)
The Rockwell psychopath's romantic search for the great climactic shoot-out, stymied at every turn by jamming guns, recalcitrant participants, and the physical truth that heads don't really explode when you shoot them, is one of the finest explorations of Hollywood's ethical code in a year filled with cinematic explorations into the roots and meaning of human cruelty. It is also a personal continuation of McDonagh's own philosophical search: this character can be seen as an extension of the younger, scarier psychopath in his Oscar-winning short "Six Shooter", a kid who kills with awful randomness and without self-catechizing, apparently in search of a Grand Guignol suicide-by-cop, and who has one of the funniest dying laments I've ever heard.
Those of us who went in hoping for the lopingly genius mix of acid humor and melancholy of In Bruges were in for initial disappointment. This is nowhere near as easily enjoyable a film, but it is also less concerned with entertaining than with its own internal debate. When the screenwriter tentatively posits the lame-sounding possibility that perhaps his movie wouldn't end with a great fiery shoot-out, but instead the characters might talk things over, the Rockwell psychopath snorts, "What, are we making French films now?" One of its more fruitful images is that of the Zodiac Killer as a happily aging hippy surrounded by rabbits and with posters of Gandhi and kittens papering his walls, and it is both an indication of the kind of humor this movie offers and a good choice for its central metaphor. Can people change? Once devoted to violence, is there a way to turn back? Is there an expiration date on the length of time we have to carry our sins? And what about an expiration date on our national sins? (In another moment of humor, the half-naked prostitute, making polite conversation with the ex-Viet Cong psychopath, asks, "Didn't we have a big war with you guys one time?")
Colin Farrell's screenwriter and Christopher Walken, as a sort of retired psychopath, play off one another extraordinarily well. Walken's amused, droll underplaying encourages Farrell into enthusiastic over-playing and then undercuts it in a happy rhythm. It's much more pleasing than the film's more central, and more frustrating, pairing of Farrell with Sam Rockwell, as Rockwell heads over the top and Farrell is forced into a quiet, straight-man role which does not inspire his finest work. He's an actor of action, Farrell, and a good one, but ill at ease when pinned passively into a chair, whereas Walken should be given Oscar after Oscar for the continuing fineness of his watching, listening, and spontaneous reacting. And for that perpetually exquisite thing he does with his eyes, when he goes from nice guy-Walken to psycho-Walken. I will never tire of that, no matter how many times I see it.
It's not the worst thing I've seen Rockwell do, and not the best. Even when he's at his full-on fightin' weight nowadays he tends to fall into his ancient schtick (which, now I think of it, is just the opposite of what Walken is doing, continually feeding new life into familiar choices, so that they feel vibrant with every repetition). Nonetheless, McDonagh has entrusted him with the most important role in the film, and he does pull off some great moments. One of my favorites is when he's doing an obviously improvised impression of Farrell and it's all "gosh and begora, bejesus," an Irishman straight out of John Ford.
As far as supporting cast, God only knows why Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko took on these entirely thankless and offensive roles. Cornish somehow manages, against the roaring misogynist tide, to find three dimensions in her insulting non-character, but Kurlyenko is lost and wasted. On the masculine side, we've got Kevin Corrigan and Michael Pitt as mob underlings, and a great sequence with Harry Dean Stanton as a psychopathic Quaker.
The long and the short of it is that once you've let go of what you thought it was going to be and enjoy it for what it is, it's like nothing you've ever seen before. For those of you who have never experienced the vast, Sturm-und-Drang joy that is McDonagh at his best, either onstage or on film, here's a short introduction via the New York Times, in which McDonagh jokingly defends his work:
Reporter: In the film, a character's head explodes, there's a decaptitation and a man's hands
are fastened to a table with knives and then he's burned alive.
McDonagh: But there's a rabbit in that scene. There's a lovely rabbit. It's not all violent.
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