The Wisdom Of Psychopaths. 7 Psychopaths.

I finally caught up with Martin McDonagh's '7 Psychopaths' last night on DVD.  It's good but I wasn't overly impressed; it felt vacuous where his previous film 'In Bruges' felt transcendent. Mostly it reminded me of all those films that came out in the wake of 'Pulp Fiction' but were pale imitators of it. Remember 'Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead',  'Go',  '2 Days In The Valley'? It's like that: very sub Tarantino fan wank with an ensemble cast of great actors playing hitting men, low lives and (obviously) psychopaths. There's lots of crazy quotable dialogue, graphic violence, "hilarious" profanity, musing and pissing about with genre/Hollywood expectations. It's very meta. Very 1995. Worst of all it falls back on that most irritating of tropes - a story about what it is to tell stories - but does nothing more with it than kick it around the parking lot a bit to see if it's dead. It is.

Colin Farrell's scripwriter character says early on:

 Yeah, I'm sick of all these stereotypical Hollywood murderer scumbag type psychopath movies. I don't want it to be one more film about guys with guns in their hands. I want it... overall... to be about love... and peace. But it still has to be about these seven psychopaths, so this Buddhist psychopath, he... he doesn't believe in violence. I don't know what the fuck he's going to do in the movie.


It's clearly the manifesto for the writer/director. He's good enough to make it work but it is a bit like having your cake and eat it time. It's all a bit: "Look at me having a great time deconstructing those awful Hollywood scumbag type psychopath movies whilst having a blast making a Hollywood scumbag type psychopath movie."
"Look at this, here's a screenwriter trying to write himself out of a hole - do you get it? Do you see what I'm doing here?"
"Look at me pointing out how women characters are always underdeveloped and then whilst providing motivation for the men with some bitches and whores I'll give the ladies one line whilst the men get monologues to die for. "

The fictional script becomes a self fulfilling prophecy; the actual script becomes a self indulgent tease that deliberately never really pays off.

I still enjoyed it for what it was and McDonagh still has the potential to do something really amazing in the future but he's got to make me connect with the characters again rather than just making them mouthpieces for smart arse dialogue.