Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Directed by: Martin McDonagh

Starring: Collin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walkin, Woody Harrelson

Other Actors of Note: Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton, Kevin Corrigan, Gabourey Sidibe

 Plot: "A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu." Taken from www.imdb.com.

Collin Farrell is forced to watch "S.W.A.T."

Hey, remember "In Bruges?"  I did a review of it way back in 2008 when I was just a young boy with a song in his heart and a skip in his step.  A youth of 20 with no wife, no baby, no job, no cancer, and all the time in the world to sit on his ass and just update blogs that nobody reads.  Oh those were truly the salad days when shitty reviews, like the one I have just linked, were things I looked at with pride and said "I am a professional."  Anyway I have not come here merely to wax nostalgic and discuss what lessons I have learned toward becoming a better reviewer (doing second drafts is not one of those things) but about the second feature film by writer/director Martin McDonagh.  That film, is "Seven Psychopaths."

This movie is a bit hard to pin down plot-wise but I will none-the-less try.  Collin Farrell plays Marty, an Irish screenwriter and self-insertion wish fulfillment character who is writing a screenplay that he has only come up with the basic idea of, that script is called "Seven Psychopaths."  I will get to that in a minute.

Marty's friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is trying to help Billy write his movie, but also help his friend Hans (Christopher Walken) in paying for his wife's cancer treatment.  Billy and Hans do this by kidnapping peoples' dogs and then returning them weeks later for reward money.  Unfortunately Billy has kidnapped the dog of a crazy asshole mob boss (Woody Harrelson) who is more than willing to murder everyone in his path toward getting the dog back.

Marty has a drinking problem, there's a masked vigilante killing off mobsters, Tom Waits is holding a bunny, a Vietnamese Catholic priest is still fighting the Vietnamese war, it's all very complicated.  As all this is going on Marty is getting ideas for his screenplay and fleshing these seven psychopaths out as they present themselves in the real world.

So let's get this out of the way.  This movie is VERY meta, like a lot.  This will of course draw the ire of a lot of film snobs and average movie-goers everywhere.  Because self-referential movies are pretentious and stupid and... whatever the fuck.  THIS IS NOT "SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK!"  The meta elements aren't "the point" of the movie.  Shut your fuck holes, I don't know why I even read comments on imdb.  I hate you all.

Anyway.

This is not a movie still.  It's just Tom Waits sitting in his living room.

Collin Farrell was the stand-out of "In Bruges" by far.  I'm glad to see that McDonagh brought him back, though he doesn't play off any of the other leads nearly as well as he played off of Brendan Gleeson.  He turns in another great performance here but of the four leads of this movie he stands out the least.  This isn't Farrell's fault as you'll come to understand in further paragraphs.

Christopher Walkin is getting really old you guys, like really old.  He plays a fairly innocent bumbling old man very well, but as with pretty much everything in this movie there are layers to his character.  Hans is a very complex man who deals with life a bit differently than anyone else, he's dark and brooding but always seems to have this bizarre cheerfulness about him.  At times it seems like all the good acting has run out of Walken but then he steps up to the plate and reminds us all that he's not Al Pacino and fuck you he's one of the greatest goddamn actors that ever lived.  Hans is a very funny and tragic character and I would be hard-pressed to think of any other actor who could pull the part off the way Walken has here.

Woody Harrelson doesn't have a lot of villain roles in his wheelhouse, aside from "Natural Born Killers" (Now there is a pretentious and dumb movie.)  So it's pretty jarring to see him as the heavy for this movie.  Charlie is a very manic character: he goes from funny to menacing seemingly at the drop of a hat and Harrelson pulls it off in the most perfect manner possible.  It's probably the best role the man has had in over a decade.  He's not really a super complex villain (he is, after all, just a really crazy angry guy) but he's memorable and reminiscent of Anton Chigur of "No Country For Old Men" at times.

Sam Rockwell gives the best performance of his career.  Billy is such a delightfully unhinged and twitchy character reminiscent at times of Brad Pitt's role in "12 Monkeys."   I have long been a fan of Rockwell but this is really just the best thing he has ever done and and I can't begin to rave about it.  In a case of Colin Farrell, Christopher Walkin, and Woody Harrelson it's Sam Rockwell that stands out by a wide margin.  If this man doesn't get an Oscar nod this year it's a crime.

Tom Waits plays Tom Waits and that's fucking delightful as always, goddammit!

Sam Rockwell explains the merits of "Gentlemen Broncos"

Upon leaving the theater with my wife she turned to me and said "That was really good, but I couldn't even begin to tell somebody what it was about."  And that is very true, this movie doesn't really have a straight narrative, it's not a 3-act story, the climax isn't really a climax and the characters don't so much grow as they change and mutate.  And you know what?  There's not a damn thing wrong with that.

There's an often unspoken belief that stories which don't follow a common narrative structure are somehow inferior from those that do but I disagree, it's usually those that don't which end up being the best.  Look at "No Country For Old Men", "Pulp Fiction", or "Once Upon a Time in the West."  These are all movies that don't have an overarching message except in the very vaguest sense, they play on emotions, thoughts, ideas.

The best movies are movies that put thoughts into your head and tug at your emotions like marionette strings.  Some of the funniest scenes in "Seven Psychopaths" involve brutal murder, laughs come immediately following sad or tense scenes.  You'll feel happy, sad, scared, horrified, relieved, and mirthful and all these changing and contrary feelings come within seconds of each other.  The movie doesn't rely on cheap twists to keep you going, most of the twists are cleared up by the 1 hour mark.  But I can honestly say I had no idea where the movie was going by the time it reached my conclusion.

I walked out of the theater filled with energy and zeal and a very pleasant feeling inside of me.  That's the magic of movies, just like how a good song sends you off into its own little world a good movie leaves you feeling excited and re-energized.  I've enjoyed a lot of movies this year but only a couple have given me this feeling and this one more than any.  This is a good movie and my nod for best movie of the year.

Sam Rockwell impersonates Nicolas Cage.

"Seven Psychopaths" is on a fairly limited release and you're likely to only find it at bigger movie-houses that have 20 or more screens.  I urge everyone very strongly to check it out.

I give this movie a 5 out of 5.

The Expendables 2 (2012)

 

Directed by: Simon West

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Nan Yu, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme

Other Actors of Note: Dolph Lundgreen, Randy Couture, Chuck Norris, Scott Adkins, Terry Crews, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Bruce Willis, Jet Li, Charisma Carpenter

Plot: Mr. Church reunites the Expendables for what should be an easy paycheck, but when one of their men is murdered on the job, their quest for revenge puts them deep in enemy territory and up against an unexpected threat... Sylvester Stallone's past film career.

"You shut your whore mouth.  'Over the Top' was a goddamn cinematic masterpiece."

Come, take my hand and travel with me back in time to that long ago year of 2010 when a little movie called "The Expendables" premiered.  It was a representation of everything we've all wanted in an action movie since we were kids: it had Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, and a bunch of action heroes all in one movie and it was incredibly violent and bloody.

Unfortunately it was also boring, and dull, and Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzeneggar were barely in it.  And where the fuck was Van-Damme?! Or Chuck Norris?!  Why do I care about Jason Statham's relationship with Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".  Eric Roberts is the villain?  How did Stallone just come off the awesomeness that was "Rambo" and then crank out this shit?! 

Well, I am here to tell you that the movie you wanted when you first heard about "The Expendables" is here, you just had to wait a couple more years.  The Expendables are back and we start the movie off with a ridiculously violent and ballsy cold open that ends with a body count of at least 200 and leaves everyone in the audience (including women) with big angry erections that can only be sated with the taste of blood.

Shortly after this, Church (Bruce Willis) calls Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and tells him he owes him a favor for cocking everything up in the first movie.  So they head to some backwater country in Eastern Europe with newjack Maggie (Nan Yu) in tow to help them recover a special device.  Upon collecting it ONE OF THEM IS KILLED.

I would say spoiler alert, but you're not stupid.  We have Stallone, Statham, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Dolph Lundgren, and Liam Hemsworth in this ragtag group.  It's like that "In Living Colour" sketch where Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and "Ensign Ricky" are beamed down to the planet.  I wonder who's gonna die?  If that doesn't give it away, Hemsworth's long speeches about "getting out of this business" to go live with his girlfriend in a happy little house with a white picket fence starts a countdown above his head pretty early on.

So after Jean Vilain (Jean-Claude VanDamme as the villain with the greatest name in the history of movies) reverse snap-kicks a knife held by henchman Hector (Scott Adkins) into Hemsworth's heart and departs on his helicopter most evilly Stallone drops to his knees and shouts to the heavens "IT SHOULD'VE BEEN COUTURE!!!!!"

And then we go into the most simplistic action plot ever.  Bad Guys want plutonium, kill Good Guys, remaining Good Guys want revenge, go after Bad Guys, kill Bad Guys, get Plutonium, save day.  This may seem like a bad thing, but it's not because the first movie showed us that plots get in the way of scenes where people die bloody bullety deaths.

"You guys liked 'Over the Top', right?"

This is an action movie, so I'm really not going to dwell on acting much more than to say it was never intrusively bad by anyone.

Stallone is Stallone, he's never been a great actor but he's always been decent.  At times the Stallone slur make him sound like Scooby Doo but he does a serviceable enough job.  Though if you're looking for any sort of nuance or complexity from Barney Ross you're looking in the wrong place.

Dolph Lundgren (possibly in an attempt to make up for Jet Li's reduced roll) has a much bigger part in this one.  Gunnar's turncoat behavior is all forgotten and never brought up, which is good because that bullshit was stupid to begin with.  Unfortunately his role as the comedic relief stretches a bit thin at times, which is a shame because out of all the old ass action stars in the movie he's one of few that's actually a pretty good actor.

Jason Statham is back, and so's his girlfriend, but she's only in one scene and keeps annoyingly calling him at the beginning of the movie.  This is all forgotten later in the movie and never brought up again.  I guess we're just supposed to know that his relationship is going okay now.  There's a lot of awesome Statham-fu.

Terry Crews and Randy Couture play two large men who shoot things and otherwise beat people.  It's a step down for Crews, but for Couture it's a step up from his annoyingly bad performance in the first one.  I still didn't much care for ole' Cauliflower Ear, but I wasn't aggressively wishing for his death this time around.

Jet Li only appears in the beginning of a movie, and his one scene makes you wish he were in the rest of it.  Watching Li punch blood out of a man's head for 3 seconds cements him as an awesome part of the movie and makes you wish he hadn't got treated so shitty in the first one so he'd actually want to come back.

Up-and-comer Scott Adkins gets the Gary Daniels role in this one as the villains main henchman/heavy.  He seems to be affecting some sort of Russian accent but he has a badass beard and a cool looking knife.  I still don't know how I feel about him being the lead in the new "Universal Soldier" movie, though.

Motherfucking Van Damme!  I now realize the mistake that his entire film career is, he's always played the hero and sucked when instead he should've been playing villains.  Everything about VanDamme that doesn't work for heroic roles works as a villain: his outrageous accent, his leathery hangdog face from years of alcoholism and drug abuse, his line delivery.  Van Damme is one of the better things about this movie and definitely an improvement on Eric Roberts' scumbag CIA agent from part 1.

Chuck Norris' strengths have never been in acting, that doesn't change one little bit here.  He's still better than Randy Couture.

Nan Yu sure is in this movie.  She sure is.

"When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way.  From your first cigarette to your last dyin' day"

As I said above, the plot to this movie is ludicrously simple, but that's one of its strengths.  The first movie tried to weave some big grandiose story when all we wanted to see was bullets going into people and dirty brawling fist fights.  Fortunately we have Simon "Con Air" West direction and not Simon "Tomb Raider/When a Stranger Calls" West, and he gives us those things in spades.

The opening of the movie just gets your blood pumping and you're ready for carnage and West barely makes you wait 30 minutes before getting some more.  After the mid-way point of the movie there's gunfights every 5 minutes until everything is dead, culminating in a massive 20-minute gun orgy where everyone (except Jet Li) wrecks everything in sight until they run out of bullets... and then we proceed with a montage of gratuitous knife-fucking until more guns happen.

Now, I want to address Chuck Norris.  Chuck is in the movie all of like 10 minutes, if that.  His character "Booker", who may or may not be the same character from "Good Guys Wear Black", is a bit of a "Lone Wolf", (get it?) so he remains out of the movie and even when he's in it he doesn't move around a lot.  This is likely because Chuck Norris is 72 years old and is starting to look and sound like Clu Gulager these days.  Still he gets a couple good moments and his character wrecks some shit up, just don't expect any spin kicks out of the senior citizen.

The final fight between Vilain and Ross is fucking phenomenal and probably one of the best of Van Damme or Stallone's careers.  It plays to their strengths with Stallone showing his boxing moves and Van Damme showing he can still do that high-jump spin-kick he's so famous for.  (Though he can apparently only do it once as the second time he does it I swear it was the footage of him doing it the first time.)  The fight between Jason Statham and mini-boss Scott Adkins is less impressive, but it does involve a helicopter so you know it's gonna be good.

Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzeneggar finally get in on the action here in a silly little scene involving a smart car that's memorable and funny.  Unfortunately Arnold is as terrible and actor as he's ever been and he really stretches the audience's patience with his trade-mark terrible one liners. (He uses a play on "I'll be back/I'm back at least 3 times")  The following is an actual exchance from the movie:

Schwarzenegger: "I'll be back"
Willis: "You're always back, this time I'll be back."
Schwarzeneggar: "Yippi Ki Yay"

then Chuck Norris walks up

Schwarzenegger: <Looks at Norris> Who's next, Rambo?

Also: Stallone has easily the worst line in anything ever.  "We keep it light until we have to go dark, and then we go pitch black."  I'm getting that tattooed on my arm AND put on my tombstone.  I wish I could graduate all over again so I could put that bitch in the year book.

The only real honest complaint I have here is that Jet Li didn't feel compelled to return for longer.  At very least the movie could have benefited from him coming in in the final hour and adding some more violence to an already absurdly violent scene.

And this isn't so much a gripe, but I found it weird that Mickey Rourke's character Tool was never mentioned.  I get why he wasn't in it as Rourke has become a bit of a prima-doma after having his career rescued by Robert Rodriguez after throwing it away by doing this exact thing years ago (Mickey Rourke is a Kenny Powers-like figure if ever there was one) but the fact that they pretend he never existed, like they found out he was a pedophile between that movie and this one, was kind of odd.

Van Damme stops the movie mid-way to try and sell the cast knives so he can keep his electricity on this month.

Ultimately, if you're looking for a deep intelligent movie you'll need to look elsewhere.  There's nothing deep and thoughtful here.  However, if you enjoy the violent spectacle of action movies from the 70s/80s/90s then "The Expendables 2" is definitely a movie you need in your life.  It exceeds the things it pays homage to in many ways and is just a lot of fun.  This is the movie that finally made me forgive Simon West for "Tomb Raider." 

Here's hoping that part 3 might feature Kurt Russell, Mark Singer, Olivier Gruner, Vin Diesel, Dwanyne Johnson, Chow Yon Fat, Donnie Yen, Tony Jaa, or Danny Trejo.

FUCK Steven Seagal.

I give "The Expendables 2" a 5 out of 5.