Seven Psychopaths Review

Like his previous film, In Bruges, for pure entertainment and endless quotability, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is one of the films of the year. Blending the stylistic violence of Tarantino, the genre deconstruction tropes of the likes of Scream and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as well as the crackling, hilarious dialogue that has become his trademark, McDonagh has returned after four years with a gangster dramedy that skewers the films upon which it was based even as it leaves most of them (let’s not carried away, this is no Pulp Fiction) trailing in its wake.

Colin Farrell arguably hasn’t given a memorable screen performance since starring in In Bruges, and in his reunion with McDonagh here he plays things relatively low-key, allowing showier performances from the likes of Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson take the limelight. Farrell plays Marty, a struggling, alcoholic screenwriter who wants to write a screenplay called “Seven Psychopaths” but hasn’t got any further than the title. His best friend, Billy (Rockwell), in a bid to help him out, places an ad in the newspaper asking for psychopaths to contact him for research purposes, while Billy’s dognapping business partner Hans (Walken) misguidedly steals Bonnie, a Shih Tzu belonging to unhinged gangster Charlie Costello (Harrelson). Walken, playing that soft, calm intensity he’s been doing his whole career, gives his best performance in years, and is the perfect foil for Rockwell, who has the manic energy and haywire unpredictability to convince the audience that his character might turn out to be the biggest psychopath of them all. Harrelson, too, while often playing for laughs via his baby-voice relationship with Bonnie, delivers chills during an exchange with Han’s wife, Myra, in her hospital room.

The film winds its way back and forth between the Bonnie Situation and Marty’s screenplay and writer’s block problems, taking detours by way of (among other scenes) Tom Waits’s psychopath Zachariah, who answers Billy’s advert to relate a tale of travelling the country killing serial killers and an extended imaginary sequence where Billy lays out his ultra-violent conclusion for Marty’s screenplay, noting that audiences will accept you killing anyone you want in a film, but woe betide you if a cute rabbit happens to catch a bullet. In this way, elements of meta also find their way into the narrative – it is surely no coincidence, for example, that the main character is an Irish writer called Martin working in Hollywood – but for all its attempts to pull you out of the film and examine it critically, it’s far too enjoyable for you to do anything but sit back and wonder how McDonagh has managed to weave so much into such a seamless screenplay, which should be a shoe-in for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination.

Violent, often side-splittingly funny, thought-provoking and even emotional at certain points, Seven Psychopaths is more than a worthy follow-up to In Bruges, confirming McDonagh as one of the most original writers and directors working in Hollywood today. One can only hope that we don’t have to wait four years for his next film to make an appearance.

4.5/5

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower Review

Every generation needs a coming-of-age movie. From Rebel Without A Cause through American Graffiti and Fast Times At Ridgemont High to The Breakfast Club and Dazed And Confused, high school years are so intensely formative and life-changing that they have made for richly fertile cinematic ground for decades. Directing the adaptation of his own novel, for which he also wrote the screenplay, Stephen Chbosky has crafted a film in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower that will stand up to the very best of the genre for legions of young people to find meaning in.

Although it’s hard to imagine the three leads, attractive as they are, ever being considered to be wallflowers at any high school across the US, they successfully convince the audience that they belong to “the island of misfit toys” – Logan Lerman plays the lead character Charlie, an introverted freshman who begins the film with no friends and hints at a traumatic period which he has only just begun to get over, with Ezra Miller and Emma Watson playing Patrick and Sam, extroverted step-siblings who don’t fit into any of the standardised cliques and so rule over their own group. Patrick is gay and has been hooking up with a jock football player who doesn’t want anyone to know that he likes men, while Sam seems sweet but, in her own way, is just as damaged as Charlie. They take him under their wing during their senior year, introducing him to the common experiences that most high-schoolers go through around the same age – first kisses, first drug usage, first dances and so on. They help him learn those important and valuable lessons about himself that every coming-of-age film likes to focus on, while becoming a key source of support for them as well.

It’s true that the film borders on kitsch at times, but it doesn’t matter – have any high-school age kids ever expressed themselves meaningfully in the way that they always seem to be able to manage in films? Even though phrases like “I feel infinite” jar when you hear them, the actors and characters are strong enough and the film moves swiftly along enough to ensure that these small missteps don’t linger in the memory. This is more of a character study, although tantalising flashbacks that show a younger Charlie and his interactions with his aunt promise and eventually much more, lending the film a much darker tone that might have been perceived from its promotion.

Miller and Watson, coming off the back of playing the psychopathic title character in We Need To Talk About Kevin and the straight-laced Hermione in the Harry Potter series respectively, are still playing school-age characters but dig into their parts with relish and skill. The flamboyant gay friend is often a thankless role but in Miller’s hands it becomes nuanced and touching and, while Watson may never escape Hermione (and especially if she doesn’t start taking on roles that can’t be compared to the character), her haltingly emotional scenes alone with Lerman demonstrate that she has already begun to grow as an actress. With the main three supported notably by Paul Rudd playing it straight as Charlie’s insightful and encouraging English teacher, the cast as a whole more than does justice to Chbosky’s story – while they may never entirely convince as wallflowers, they show that there are undeniably perks to being one.

4/5

Killing Them Softly Review

From Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner in Prizzi’s Honor and Jean Reno in Leon to Max and Al from The Killers and John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank, hitmen (and women) are an iconic and, some would argue, overused cinematic trope. They’re either psychopaths or wisecrackers, highly efficient or utterly incompetent, believable or unbelievable. How many more different ways can they be represented on screen? This is the challenge faced by Andrew Dominik when he came to adapt the 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, which has now made it to the screen in a production entitled Killing Them Softly.

Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) are two small-time hoods recruited by slightly-bigger-but-still-small hood, Johnny the Squirrel (Vincent Curatola) to rob a Mob-protected card game run by Markie (Ray Liotta). It goes off without a hitch so the Mob, represented by its mouthpiece lawyer (Richard Jenkins), turns to Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), one of the Mob’s enforcers, to track them down.

It’s a simple plot and, given that there are no major surprises or twists at any point during the film, it has to work hard to hold our attention, and it mainly succeeds in doing so through dialogue and direction. The establishment of Frankie and Russell and their scenes together after the heist (including a memorable interaction where Frankie desperately tries to find out how much information Russell has unwittingly given away while he nods off on heroin) allows opportunities for black comedy, while the heist itself, which involves Frankie trying to control a room full of undoubtedly armed men with nothing but a sawn-off shotgun, is nailbitingly tense. A dragging middle section featuring two lengthy scenes between Pitt and James Gandolfini (not the fault of either actor – the script and staging let them down), who plays Mickey, a booze-addled, hooker-addicted killer brought in by Cogan to take care of one of the targets, is saved by a triumphant final third featuring a stunning performance by McNairy.

What attempts to elevate Killing Them Softly above the heights attainable by a mere hitman/gangster flick is the social commentary that permeates it throughout. Rather than follow the novel and set in the 1970s, Dominik, who is a director rapidly gaining a reputation for creativity and ingenuity following his previous two films Chopper and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, has chosen to juxtapose the lives and financial struggles of these low-to-mid level crooks (going against the grain of the opulence demonstrated in the likes of The Sopranos and Goodfellas) against the 2008 banking crisis – the faceless suits represented by Jenkins’s lawyer are forced to be every bit as cautious and careful with their money as the banks should have been. Cogan is cynical when watching speeches of Barack Obama promising that the economy will get better and the audience, with the benefit of hindsight, sympathises with him. What has he got to look forward to? Will he end up like Gandolfini’s Mickey? Or will he eventually end up on the wrong end of a gun with nothing to show for it? Although the film attempts to concern itself with these themes, it cannot strike a good balance – often forgotten about and heavy-handed when remembered, it doesn’t quite work

Dominik’s direction, however, never wavers – one assassination is slowed right down to the point where it looks like a beautifully rendered “bullet time” sequence from a video game, and a key scene between Pitt and McNairy uses a series of close-ups to ramp up the tension again, even though we know what the outcome of the conversation will be. Eventually, like the film as a whole, it can only end in one way.

4/5

Lawless Review

John Hillcoat’s middle name could be Bleak. John Bleak Hillcoat. He has made his name over the past few years directing the hugely successful The Proposition, a violent and meditative film about criminals and lawmen in the Australian Outback and The Road, an adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy which follows a father and son making their way across a post-apocalyptic America. His latest effort, Lawless, captures that same feeling of bleakness and, in many ways, desperation, that his characters regularly seem to battle with, but in a much lighter manner.

Lawless, which sees him team up again with musician Nick Cave, who wrote the screenplay for The Proposition and does so here, tells the story of the Bondurant brothers – Howard (Jason Clarke), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Jack (Shia LaBeouf) – who make and sell moonshine liquor in Franklin County, Virginia, during the Prohibition period. They don’t have a lot but they get by – they have no other option. Things are going pretty well until a special agent from out-of-town, Charley Rakes (Guy Pearce), turns up with the intention of clearing house.

Something that becomes evident as the film goes on is the fact that it feels like it’s trying to be The Godfather (tropes include Jack as the youngest trying to take more responsibility with his brothers denying him a la Michael Corleone and the prologue and epilogue designed to give the film the feel of an epic), but it isn’t anywhere near the length it needs to be for an epic like that and as a result it comes in overlong in terms of the length it perhaps should have been. We follow Forrest and Jack’s dalliances with two women, Maggie (Jessica Chastain) and Bertha (Mia Wasikowska) respectively and, while the two actresses perform well, neither needed to be in the film and neither gets enough screen time to make anything like the impression we know they can. This is a man’s world, where violence is king, and the addition of women seems not only forced but slows the pacing down too far – this could have been a punchy eighty-five or ninety minutes but clocks in just shy of two hours. Things aren’t helped by the addition of Gary Oldman as big-town gangster Floyd Banner – as good as he is and although his addition helps to resolve a couple of plot points, they’re not so big that they couldn’t have been resolved in a different way and, as a result, his scenes only serve to bloat the film unnecessarily.

When things remain focussed on the conflict between the Bondurants and Charley Rakes, things take a turn for the better. Hardy as the stoic, monosyllabic Forrest is both menacing in his demeanour and endearing in his quiet longing for Maggie, while Pearce’s effeminate glove-wearing appearance and tittering, quick-to-anger performance makes Rakes both pantomime villain and threatening adversary. Forrest acts as the only thing standing between Rakes and his brothers, the young and cocky Jake and the moonshine-addled Howard and whenever he’s out of the picture, Rakes usually makes someone suffer – it’s clear that the Bondurants have no other choice than to run bootleg moonshine across county, and either them or Rakes will have to go. Regardless of what we’re seeing, Hillcoat frames it beautifully and injects humour into situations we normally wouldn’t find funny as a method of getting us to root for characters we normally wouldn’t dream of rooting for.

Although it wanted to be a slow-burning gangster epic, Lawless ultimately comes in too short to achieve its aims, and in the process becomes too long to act as a quick, violent snapshot of a violent period. Redeemed by Hillcoat’s direction and the performances of Chastain, Hardy and Pearce, this is at least an example of a film that reached for greatness and fell short, rather than a film that didn’t even get off the launch pad.

3.5/5