Seven Psychopaths: energetically directed and intermittently amusing

Welcome to the mobsters' ball.

Seven Psychopaths (15)
dir: Martin McDonagh

The hero of Seven Psychopaths, written and directed by the playwright-turned-film-maker Martin McDonagh, is a screenwriter named Martin – Marty to his pals – who is working on a script called Seven Psychopaths. He doesn’t know what it is yet, only that it won’t be another movie about guys with guns in their hands. Marty is played by Colin Farrell, the star of McDonagh’s sparklingly executed first film, In Bruges, which was all about guys with guns in their hands. So Seven Psychopaths is a movie that knows it’s a movie, populated by characters who seem content to be archetypes. The question is whether it will fulfil its ambition to be a piece of violent cinema about the perils of violent cinema. Can McDonagh have his cake and blow it to smithereens too?

It must be said that the cake in question is a little on the stale side. The picture kicks off with a vignette featuring two hitmen distracted from the task in hand by their own incessant chatter. This must be a dig at the films of Quentin Tarantino, in which hoodlums tend to talk first about the pros and cons of the Dewey Decimal System, or grilling versus sautéing – and shoot later. But Pulp Fiction was 18 years ago. From such a distance, McDonagh’s intended sideswipe looks more like a matey punch on the shoulder.

He isn’t the first director to use film as a platform to examine the casually corrosive effects of screen violence, but most of the precedents (Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence, Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon) haven’t placed fun high on their list of priorities. At least Seven Psychopaths is energetically directed and intermittently amusing. The movie presents Marty as no less blank than the page in his typewriter. The devil on his shoulder is the frenzied Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell), a budding actor who urges him to write a revenge story with a desert shoot-out. (“What are we making here, a French movie?” Billy asks when his friend resists.) The reference to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle makes us doubly alert to character names, as we should be in a film where a saintly cancer sufferer is called Kieslowski (after the Polish director of one of the most persuasive of all anti-violence films, A Short Film About Killing).

Billy does his best to get Marty’s creative juices flowing by placing a newspaper ad calling for genuine psychopaths to contact him with their stories. It’s just the sort of unhinged scheme you’d expect from a man who earns his keep kidnapping dogs, which are then returned a few days later to their owners by Billy’s accomplice, Hans (Christopher Walken), in exchange for the inevitable cash reward. Hans is the angel of the film, a formerly vengeful man who has renounced his old ways and now offers to help with Marty’s screenplay as long as it isn’t violent. His notes are suitably withering, pinpointing the absence of decent female characters. It’s a transparent double-bluff that doesn’t let McDonagh off the hook for his own film’s identical shortcoming.

When Billy and Hans unknowingly snatch the beloved pooch of a local mobster, Charlie (Woody Harrelson), LA’s professional criminals come storming into their cosy world of unambitious grifts. But these thugs are not quite top of the food chain: a serial killer is stalking the city bumping off figures in the organised crime business. Perhaps the murderer is a fan of Dexter, the TV series about a killer who kills killers, or maybe that echo is another sign that this script, written before In Bruges, has been sitting on the shelf too long.

The film is shot in zinging gobstopper colours and performed with vigour by most of the cast – the hyperactive Rockwell and the stately Walken, with his kabuki-like face, really have the measure of McDonagh’s firecracker dialogue. But despite the picture’s anti-violence philosophy, it is no more successful than Last Action Hero, the Arnold Schwarzenegger folly that tried to deconstruct the genre for which it was also an enthusiastic advocate. It’s usually the case in these situations that no one really gets what they want – the action lacks the proper sense of abandon and the blood-stained thesis is never quite searching enough. Seven Psychopaths proves once again that the lion may not lie down with the media studies professor.