Seven Psychopaths

The play writing world wasn't enough for Martin McDonagh. The brilliant award winning playwrite broke into the movie world with his oscar winning short film 6-shooter starring Brendan Gleeson. Then in 2008, McDonagh released the critically praised In Bruges featuring Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes. It is quite literally one of the best movies of all time. And if you don't think so, shame on you. Four long years we had to wait for the next McDonagh film. In many ways it was worth the wait, but it many others the sophomore effort just can't quite reach the level of the first.

The story of Seven Psychopaths, like all of McDonagh's work, is always hard to pin down. You can guess where it's going but it was a total fluke if you actually predicted it correctly. It revolves around Marty (Colin Farrell), an alcoholic Irish screenwriter (Get it?) who is trying to come up with seven psychopathic characters for his new film entitled Seven Psychopaths (Seriously, do you get it? Because if you don't you shouldn't watch movies).

His best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is a struggling actor who wants nothing more than to help write Marty's screenplay and potentially star in it. But he's not very good at it. So in his spare time he and Hans (Christopher Walken) steal dogs from the park and then bring them back to their owners to collect the reward money. Only one day, they steal Charlie's (Woody Harrlson) adorable Shih Tzu. Charlie is a ruthless mob boss who loves his dog way more than his girlfriend or anything else in life.

And that's about as much as I can summarize without ruining some really fun and creative parts of the film. There's a whole lot more going on and I don't want to spoil anything.

So let's talk about the film's strengths. You don't see writing and dialogue like this outside of a Tarantino movie. Except I think it is even better. It's quick, it's funny and if you look away for a second you might miss the brilliance of it. Of course thankfully this time there is only one Irish accent. (I am notoriously bad at understanding other accents) The actors themselves are top notch. Sam Rockwell is in peak form as he always is, Colin Farrell is always better when he plays an alcoholic Irishman, Tom Waits is gleefully delightful as a psychopath and Woody Harrelson is forever awesome when holding a gun.

But the shining star (if there is allowed to be one) is Christopher Walken. Every line out of his mouth was either hilarious, poignant, thought-provoking or so tear jerking you want to hug him. This is his Supporting Actor Oscar nomination to lose.

And the gore! Oh god it is wonderful. McDonagh has a little love affair with gratuitous, but at the same time, hilarious amounts of gore. Headshots, throat slittings, blood shooting everywhere. It gets graphic. Thankfully, while gross, it doesn't stray too far into the too much area but it might be a little shocking to many viewers.

But Seven Psychopaths fails on a couple of levels. There's a little bit of "Hollywood" as my friends called it, pushed into the film. It's not bad, but it is noticeable. There's also several storylines happening at any one time. And both the trailer and the poster are an extreme lie. The trailer doesn't even mention the screenwriting plot and the poster lists two women as some of the psychopaths. Combined, those actresses have about 5 lines of dialogue before disappearing forever. Which results in a hilarious scene in which Hans reads Marty's script.

"Do you know women who can string coherent sentences together?"
"Yes."
"Then where are they in this screenplay?"

The film also does a poor job of connecting the scenes. Halfway through the movie they end up in the desert. With tents. With no real explanation as to how, or why they drove from L.A. to the desert.

Seven Psychopaths delivers a unique twist on the old person in a movie trying to write a screenplay gag. And it has some of the best actors in the biz going at it with some fantastic lines of dialogue. People who aren't familiar with In Bruges probably won't enjoy it. The scenes tend to have a disconnect and it just wasn't organized well. A little too many good ideas forcefully shoved into one movie.

2 1/2 stars out of 4

-Christopher O'Connell

P.S. No one can deny the brilliance and sheer creativity shown in Christopher Walken's final monologue. I wish I could come up with ideas like that.

Looper

Time travel, a frightening child actor and Bruce Willis? It's like director Rian Johnson wrote down the requirements for a science fiction film and then said "Yeah, that's what I want in my new movie." Fortunately for him, and for us, he did it in a creative way that rises above tired sci-fi tropes and delivers a genuinely entertaining, if confusing, action film.

In the future, time travel has been discovered. And outlawed. Instead of using it exclusively to go back in time and draw inappropriate pictures on Hitler's face while he's sleeping, the world's future criminal organizations use time travel as a way to kill people. Because it's super hard to hide a body in the future or something. So they send people they want dead back to about 50 years from our present to be killed.

The guys who do the killing are called loopers. They wait at a predetermined position, use a shotgun like gun called a blunderbuss to blow away a recently time traveled hooded target, and collect their payment in the form of silver sent back with the target. Then they dispose of the body, usually with fire. But there's a catch that comes in the form of the phrase "closing the loop." To erase all knowledge of this operation loopers have thirty years of life given to them, at the end of thirty years they are sent back in time to be killed by themselves. For an extra reward the young self is given a large amount of gold to compensate for killing himself. The only rule is never let your target go free.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, see what they did there?) is a looper. He waits in a cornfield, checks his pocket watch and carefully aims his blunderbuss. A white sheet is spread out in front of him. A man appears. Boom. In an instant he is blown away. There is no thinking, just acting. But one day after watching multiple loopers close their own loops, a man appears on his sheet but this time he isn't wearing a hood. The split second that Joe hesitates allows Old Joe (Bruce Willis) to escape, the one thing you're not allowed to let happen. Now Joe has to hunt himself down.

Sounds like a sci-fi chase action film right? Wrong. What the trailer doesn't reveal is about half of the story line. And I was very pleased with that. There is nothing quite like assuming you know what a movie will be about and then watching it take a complete right turn. Rian Johnson has thrown together, at minimum, at least 2 separate movies. Normally this would be a confusing experience, and at some points it is, but he keeps it all together for a satisfying sci-fi flick.

I had a real debate with a friend about the merits of this film. He thought some of the emotional moments were cheapened by the fact that they were forced to happen. I would half agree, but it doesn't make them less emotional for me and for most audience members. There are hard choices here. Some of them gory. There were many times where I stared at the screen slack jawed or quietly whispering to the man next to me "oh no."

Because for sheer entertainment value, "Looper" is hard to beat. Close range shotgun blasts are brutal, Levitt and Willis are fantastic at acting, and Johnson has created a believable world very much informed by past sci fi movies but unique in itself.

Sure there are some poor cheesy choices. And if anyone takes the time to actually think about the time travel stuff it would all fall apart, kind of like how "Inception" loses itself after multiple viewings. The final scene with Levitt is a mishmash of ridiculousness. This is his actual line, "And I saw it, a boy and a man, trapped forever making the same choices, stuck in a circle." LIKE A LOOP JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT? LIKE A GIANT LOOP? JUST SAY IT, IF YOU'RE GOING TO DESCRIBE THE TITLE JUST SAY IT. Also, for anyone who saw the movie, Joe had about 20 different options to pick before choosing what he did. But instead he was like eh, all or nothing right?

But is "Looper" good? I honestly have no idea. And I saw it 3 weeks ago. But I loved watching it and I would certainly watch it again. If just to see Bruce Willis dual wield machine guns.

3 out of 4 stars

-Christopher O'Connell

P.S. Did anyone else get a Walking Dead vibe as soon as Joe got to the farm? Thankfully it wasn't nearly as long or as boring.

The Expendables 2: A Quick Review

Is there any reason for this movie? No. There is not. But it has the most hilarious subtitle ever in the history of ever. Not many posters feature it because it is so mind boggingly stupid. Is Expendables 2 a good movie? Not by a long shot. Did I have fun watching it? You bet I did.

The crew is back, completely forgiving Dolph Lundgren for being a total bush in the first movie and they finally added a character that's actually under the age of 35. Hello Liam Hemsworth. The badass army war sniper who is the only title character to die. Wait WHAT?! Yup, spoiler alert. Liam dies. I guess he made everyone else look bad, or old.

But who cares? These films are so stupid that it really doesn't matter who lives or dies. Jet Li quite literally jumps out of a plane so he can stop being in these movies. But don't worry they bring out Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis to shoot endless waves of bad guys.

There's no real plot. Jean-Claude Van Damme is just a civilian killing dick looking to sell old Russian nuclear warheads to terrorists (Seriously Russia, hide your old nukes.) And the Expendables are there to kill him and all his henchmen.

If you don't like stupid action films, don't bother. This won't change your mind. If, like me, you laughed endlessly at the first one's stupidity, gives Expendables 2 a try. Only this time around, Stallone and crew are finally in on the joke instead of pretending they're trying to make a decent movie.

0 out of 4 stars in actual movie world.

3 out of 4 stars in action/hilarious movie world.

-Christopher O'Connell