Sev­en Psychopaths

Mar­tin McDonagh’s Sev­en Psy­chopaths is a lunatic shag­gy dog yarn that’s help­less­ly in thrall to ​’90s pop ephemera. As a fol­low-up to In Bruges, it’s fas­ci­nat­ing, often very amus­ing and cer­tain­ly a more dar­ing and idio­syn­crat­ic (if less instant­ly crowd-pleas­ing) cin­e­mat­ic feat.

It’s an unwieldy film about a con­fused writer that pos­i­tive­ly heaves with sub­text and self-effac­ing insid­er barbs. It’s per­haps even more inter­est­ing when tak­en in the light of In Bruges, as McDon­agh appears to be using this new film to decon­struct the crit­i­cisms lev­elled at his mis­chie­vous debut, most notably whether it’s tru­ly pos­si­ble to sym­pa­thise with a murderer.

Col­in Far­rell plays a washed-up, hooch-addled Irish screen­writer named, ahem, Mar­ty, who is sti­fled in his attempts to make a new and orig­i­nal state­ment about screen vio­lence. His gauche, mouthy best pal Bil­ly (a film-steal­ing Sam Rock­well) wants to help him out, but his time is tak­en up with kid­nap­ping dogs and ran­som­ing them back to their own­ers. He exe­cutes this scam with the help of Christo­pher Walken’s lacon­ic, cra­vat-sport­ing hus­tler, Hans, who is attempt­ing to raise the cash to pay for an oper­a­tion for his ter­mi­nal­ly ill wife.

All this dog both­er­ing courts the ire of trig­ger-hap­py local hood Char­lie (Woody Har­rel­son), espe­cial­ly when Bil­ly mess­es with the wrong mutt. To say any more would both spoil the fun and under­sell the film, as McDon­agh flips, remoulds, recounts and digress­es at any and every oppor­tu­ni­ty, dis­tanc­ing him­self from a three-act bud­dy road movie and instead fash­ion­ing a ver­bose, excitable, mul­ti-ten­ta­cled essay on male rela­tion­ships, pedan­tic seman­tics and cin­e­mat­ic lore.

The writer/director’s propen­si­ty for wil­ful­ly blind­sid­ing the view­er occa­sion­al­ly back­fires, com­ing across as shock for shock’s sake, but he most­ly man­ages to pull off these com­bat­ive flights of fan­cy with rib­ald aplomb.

The direc­tor also dis­plays a mag­pie-like fond­ness for ​’90s indie cin­e­ma, bor­row­ing the poet­ic, desert-bound con­fes­sion­al from Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine, the labyrinthine neo-noir plot­ting from the Coen broth­ers’ The Big Lebows­ki, and every ounce of meta-swag­ger that he could wring from Tarantino’s Pulp Fic­tion. Hans’ sur­name is even Kies­lows­ki. And yet the numer­ous scenes of bick­er­ing and swear­ing are raised to the lev­el of dark poet­ry, with one sprawl­ing and hilar­i­ous camp­fire mono­logue deliv­ered by Rock­well that tru­ly has to be seen to be believed.

But where McDon­agh can do no wrong as a writer, he stum­bles as a direc­tor, often set­tling for func­tion­al medi­um shots as a way of mere­ly cap­tur­ing the free-flow­ing dia­logue. There is an awful lot to process in this film, and by the time you reach the home straight there is the vague sense that McDon­agh has tied him­self in knots.

It’s some­times hard to gauge how the dis­cur­sive vignettes inter­lock with one anoth­er, bar the slight­ly neb­u­lous and unful­fill­ing sug­ges­tion that writ­ing about and research­ing psy­chopaths is some­thing of a dead­ly and unpre­dictable pur­suit. But this is more than a fas­ci­nat­ing folly.

It’s an exam­ple of an artist push­ing both him­self and his sub­ject mat­ter to their out­er lim­its. McDon­agh is lay­ing dyna­mite at the base of a decrepit old insti­tu­tion, and it’s invig­o­rat­ing to witness.