Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths arrives from 2012, a moment when a crime comedy could still concern a struggling screenwriter, a stolen Shih Tzu, and the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood without any obligation to instruct the audience on how to live. Colin Farrell plays Marty, an alcoholic writer who has a title and nothing else. Around him orbit Sam Rockwell's dog-napping actor, Christopher Walken's quietly grieving widower, and Woody Harrelson's gangster who loves his dog more than people. The film is a shaggy, self-aware contraption that keeps interrupting itself to debate how it ought to end. Critics in the autumn of 2012 found this charming. Audiences found it merely fine, and it opened at number nine.

The picture's moral universe is one of revenge, loyalty, and the futility of both, and it declines to convert any of that into a lesson. The Viet Cong assassin who travels in a priest's collar, avenging a family killed at My Lai, functions as a plot device and a punchline, not as a vehicle for historical instruction. The women are few, and the two most prominent are murdered to motivate the men. The title's psychopaths are killers, not a clinical population deserving of sensitive portrayal. The cast is white, the concerns are masculine, and the film has no interest in correcting either fact. It is a comedy about men behaving badly that never apologizes and never asks the audience to feel implicated.

The result, then, is a film with no agenda beyond its own cleverness. It is funny, violent, and faintly hollow. Nothing in it lectures, represents, or advocates. There is nothing here to score, which in a certain light is its own kind of distinction.