First Hit: A very oddly violent funny film.
Like many people I watched the funny and odd previews for this film and the result of going to see this film is that it is more violent and funnier than I anticipated.
The concept of a film being written about the film the audience is watching is not new, but the way this was done was inventive in that the scenes were near the edge of believable. They were bizarrely constructed and well executed.
The actors were the glue that made these stories work. Billy (played by Sam Rockwell) is the main character whose has a best friend named Marty (played by Colin Farrell). Marty is struggling to write a new screenplay based on a name he thinks he came up with, “Seven Psychopaths”.
But as the film moves along we see that is Billy who is coaxing this story along and Marty's job is to coalesce it into a viable screenplay. Billy also has another job, he steals dogs with Hans (played by Christopher Walken) and then when the owner posts a reward for the dog, Hans returns the dog, collects the reward.
Hans is married to Myra who has cancer and Hans gives her the money for her treatment. Billy steals a mob bosses’ Shih Tzu named Bonny. The mob boss named Charlie (played by Woody Harrelson) is very attached to his dog and he and his band of thugs are out to find and kill the thieves.
There are other oddly outstanding characters including a Vietnamese Priest (played by Long Nguyen) who is out for revenge. The downside of the film for me was that there was a whole host of gratuitous violence.
Rockwell was expertly cast. He’s great at looking and acting normal but psychopathic at the same time. Farrell is good here as well. He’s the sane one. Walken is a trip. He does this role effortlessly – great job. Harrelson is strong in this part as a gangster. It is slightly different than “Natural Born Killers” and his turn as Larry Flynt in “The People vs. Larry Flynt gave him the wherewithal to do another turn in a wheelchair in a small scene. Martin McDonagh put together a very oddly constructed and engaging script in which he directed the same way.
Overall: Even days after watching the film I smile and chuckle with the memory playback of some of the scenes.