Seven Psychopaths is delightfully self-aware, self-referential, and self-parodying, and the audience is in on the joke. In exists in the vein of greats (and sometimes not-so-greats) about writers who live out their work, like Adaptation (great) and Synecdoche, New York (not so great).
Seven Psychopaths follows Marty (Colin Farrell), as he attempts to write a movie called “Seven Psychopaths” in Los Angeles. His friend Billy (Sam Rockwell), a struggling actor, tries to help Marty find inspiration that will overpower his debilitating alcoholism by introducing Marty to as many psychopaths as he can find, including the unsettling and hilarious bunny rabbit-toting Tom Waits as Zachariah.
Marty starts to feel a little overwhelmed by all these real-life psychopaths popping up, so he hides out at Billy’s side job while it blows over. It just so happens that Billy and his buddy Hans (Christopher Walken) are part-time dog kidnappers who systematically return the stolen dogs and use the reward money to fund Hans’ s wife’s cancer treatments. After stealing (and “forgetting” to return) the dog of local mob boss Charlie (a brutal but emotional Woody Harrelson), the trio find themselves on a road trip into the southern California desert to escape his revenge.
Don’t let the poster fool you; instead of being a team caper movie, the characters employ a very liberal definition of the word “psychopath” in order to include many of the ancillary characters. Seven Psychopaths cleverly borrows genre cliches from mysteries, westerns, action movies, melodramas, and road trip films to create a hilarious and loving tribute to the movies. When the characters brainstorm about what makes a good movie, we soon see these ideas play out in the movie we are watching. It is, at the risk of sounding facetious, very meta. The dialogue is whip smart and the film culminates in a satisfying, perfect ending that ties up the loose ends that should be tied up (while leaving some loose ends loose, which contributes to the brilliance of the script).
Seven Psychopaths plays like an old friend who thinks the same way you do. It has a sort of shorthand that takes the audience along like a conversation, or perhaps a mystery, in which they’re as much a part of writing Marty’s script as the contributing characters.
It’s a shame this movie is so niche, because it features some great and well-crafted comedy typical of director Martin McDonagh’s last film, In Bruges (also starring Colin Farrell, who features perfectly in McDonagh’s off-kilter brand of humor). The comedy isn’t necessarily high-minded but it is crafty and clever, much like the criminals and street-smart fellows featured so prominently in the film (and in the film-within-a-film).
The exponentially increasing stakes in Seven Psychopaths harken to old screwball comedies like Some Like it Hot and It Happened One Night, while it borrows classic “film-within-a-film” narratives without the lofty surrealism or refined subtle humor often associated with the trait. It takes special level of script writing prowess and well-timed acting to make audiences so easily transition from being moved to being amused to being on the edge of their seats, and McDonagh and crew obviously pulled it off.
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