The Mark of Zorro: SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS

I saw Martin McDonagh's first film, In Bruges, only a few months ago. Since then I have been a huge fan of Martin McDonagh and consider In Bruges the funniest movie I have seen. When I saw the trailer for Seven Psychopaths a few months back I was beyond excited. I usually don't laugh when I see trailers for comedies but I remember laughing when Christopher Walken told the gunman no when he was demanded to put his hands in the air. Also the cast is stacked with comedic pehnoms like Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell. It seemed as though McDonagh was going to create another aggressively funny comedic masterpiece.

After seeing Seven Psychopaths I can confidently say that this movie was not another comedic masterpiece. Don't get me wrong it's still a smart, viciously funny above average comedy. I still had a good time seeing this movie and was laughing most of the way through. However this movie greatly suffered from trying too hard which left me feeling confused and sometimes distracted trying to keep up with this extremely complicated plot and the seemingly infinite amount of characters.

I will try to briefly sum up the plot so I can get on with the review. Marty (Farrell) is a screen writer who is struggling on writing a screenplay for a movie called Seven Psychopaths. His friend Billy (Rockwell) is trying to help him but unintentionally distracts him by kidnapping the dog of psycho mob man Charlie (Harrelson) with his dog kidnapping business partner Hans (Walken) and also uninteionally gets Marty involved. Charlie is mad and sets off on a manhunt and will kill anyone who gets in his way and anyone who was involved with the dog napping.

The things that made In Bruges an above average comedy was its simplicity and the aggressively funny and realistic dialogue. When you think about it comedies now a days either have a strange plot or strange characters. Most of the times things are over-exaggerated so much that things are either outlandishly funny or just plain stupid. In Bruges however broke the mold of typical contemporary comedies by having a simple, easy to follow plot, realistic, non-cartoonish characters and is hysterically funny because of the great dialogue and sort of odd situations that these mostly normal people go through.

In Seven Psychopaths it still has the great and very funny dialogue that In Bruges had but it has an extremely convoluted plot, many crazy and cartoonish characters and many occurrences of outlandish and bizarre events that you could find in any Will Ferrell comedy. These crazy characters and bizarre events still had me chuckle most of the time but the laughs didn't feel as funny or as genuine as they did in In Bruges. I would say that I chuckled a lot more than I did in In Bruges but that's because I never chuckled once in In Bruges. Everything that was funny in In Bruges was worthy of a genuine laugh.

Like I said before I did like this movie. It was funny, creative and mostly enjoyable when it wasn't confusing. Every actor in this movie was exceptionally great especially Walken and Rockwell who steal every scene that they are in. However I did have extemley high expectations and this movie was a slight let down. I still believe, despite my disappointments, that Seven Psychopaths is a smart, slightly above average comedy so I will give it the slightly above average rating of a C+.