In his first movie, In Bruges, two contract killers are sent to the Belgian city to … wait. Naturally, while waiting, they do a lot of talking — not conversation so much as fragmented phrases thrown back and forth in a sort of demented stichomythia. (In Bruges also apparently holds the record for the most instances of the word “fuck”. Or is it “fucking”?)
McDonagh dispenses with the talky assassins in a quick introduction to his new film, Seven Psychopaths, and then goes on to do a sort of Adaptation with psychopaths instead of orchids. Well, the screenwriter in the storyline about a screenwriter writing a movie script is not adapting anything as such — this is an original screenplay. He’s got the task of thinking up his own script from scratch, which may be less painful than having to adapt someone else’s tale.
Either way, the scriptwriter in such a story has to be having difficulty with his work. No writer in any movie of any kind ever seems to simply get on with it; they all have to have problems doing any writing at all. At least nowadays, in the age of computers, we don’t have that repetitive cutaway to the crumpled paper landing in the dustbin as the writer rejects first this attempt, then the next … Anyway, writer or screenwriter, he has to have angst, probably a relationship crumbling too. Check and check.
This screenwriter is played by Colin Farrell, who was the junior killer in In Bruges, so that’s a bit of intertextuality to be going on with. He’s got a brilliant title for his movie — Seven Psychopaths. Now he just has to make up the story. Luckily he has a pretty psychopathic friend (Sam Rockwell) to offer ideas, and the friend’s associate (Christopher Walken) is a dognapper by trade, so that adds to the fun.
Mostly the trio of Farrell, Rockwell and Walken conjure up an amusing black comedy, and Woody Harrelson as a mafia boss is very funny too (while being scary in a way none of the others can quite manage). They’re playing off a very good script, of course — very good, at any rate, as far as dialogue goes. As for structure, some will dislike the jumpy, tricky, self-doubling storyline, and Seven Psychopaths certainly does the metafictional bounce between storytelling levels with gusto.
Such tricks can leave a movie feeling as though there isn’t any real story inside it, or that there are too many stories to cohere. Seven Psychopaths runs that risk with a grin; it pulls it off because it’s funny.