I was expecting some absurdist twists and off-the-wall characters, but I also vaguely thought I knew which paths Seven Psychopaths was likely to tread. Well, I can safely say that those expectations were completely off track 😂 Far from being just another gangster comedy with a great cast, Seven Psychopaths is a bizarrely meta movie about a writer that is attempting to, well, write the film we're watching, whilst he finds out that the people in his life are, in fact, the perfect characters for the film he's struggling with. Sound confusing? It could have been, but they actually play it out really well. There are a number of big twists and I can safely say that I saw none of them coming, whilst the fully telegraphed plot points just serve to double-down on that meta-narrative that blurs the boundary of plot, reality, and film.

Throw on top some genuinely excellent performances from what was already a fantastic cast and the scripting really shines. Christopher Walken deserves a particular shout-out there, as his character could have been fun no matter who was cast, but only Walken could have pulled off that level of glint-in-the-eye madness with such subtlety. In particular, his obsession with the (fully fictional) Vietnamese psychopath, and his final conversation with the main henchman, are utterly brilliant to watch and had me chuckling along merrily. They're both great examples of why the absurdist humour here works: it's not just satire or parody, the film-makers use the psychopathy of their characters as a way to shine a light on the natural disconnect in believable situations and, in doing so, make the outcome both realistic and baffling. Walken simply refusing to stick his hands up because he "doesn't want to" is an ideal example, as for a character who just doesn't see human life in the same way as others would, the reality of having a gun pointed at them is identical regardless of whether they have their hands in the air. That the (non-psychopathic) goon fully struggles to empathise with this position is ripe for comedic interrogation, and the film does just that.

This isn't to say that the film is perfect. The meta gags do get a little long in the tooth at times (and I'm still not sure if drawing attention to the poor writing of female characters was brilliant or hacky), and the final shoot-out is perhaps a little drawn out (though even here, the dialogue between Farrell, Harrelson, and Rockwell is just so wonderfully, realistically bizarre, it manages to be extremely fun), which results in a weird pacing curve. Plus, whilst I'm glad they addressed the credits request in the mid-credits scene, the joke didn't particularly work, and I can't help but feel that they should have just actually rolled the message in the film. I mean, talk about meta gags: a film about a man writing a film, in which he struggles to work out which parts of his story are his own fiction and which are a version of the people he has met, who gets asked to add a specific message into the credits of said film, which then appear at the end of the actual film? I was already starting to wonder if any of the plot was based on real events, and I think that final fourth-wall break might have really lent itself to that feeling of surrealism, much better than a quick throwaway joke that, if anything, actually undermines that aspect of the narrative. But hey, it's still a lot of fun, and it definitely surprised me in mostly good ways 👍