For the record, it's English. I was born in Tilbury, Essex, made temporarily 
American citizen?"
The opening shot to Seven Psychopaths is the iconic Hollywood sign on the hill. It not only tells us where we are but also acts as a chapter heading to the beginning of the film; this is not the real world we’re entering, it’s the parallel world of movies where everything looks real, but it’s not, not really.
Written and directed by Martin McDonagh who previously worked with Colin Farrell in In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths populates the same world – guns, gangsters, and no one possessing anything remotely close to a moral compass – only the location has changed; we’ve moved from continental Europe to sun soaked L.A.
Farrell plays Marty, an alchoholic screenwriter who wants nothing more than to finish his screenplay. He has a title – Seven Psychopaths – but that’s about as far as it goes. What he needs is inspiration, and knocking back the booze isn’t helping. “I don’t want it to be another movie about guys with guns in their hands,” Marty declares. Enter best friend, Sam Rockwell as out-of-work actor, part-time dog-knapper and full-time loon, Bill. Bill wants to be Marty’s version of a muse and sets about telling his friend stories of psychopaths he has known or has heard about in the hope they’ll make it into Marty’s screenplay.
Marty’s script and Bill’s stories are the backbone to everything – you never quite know if everything Bill tells Marty is a fantasy or real – but everyone has to make a living, and Bill’s living consists of kidnapping dogs with help from his equally oddball friend Hans (played by the appropriately oddball Christopher Walken) then returning the canines to their distraught owners and collecting the reward. Unfortunate events kick into action when Bill and Hans kidnapp a mobster’s dog (Woody Warrelson) setting off a chain reaction of violent events that somehow becomes material for Marty’s Seven Psychopaths script.
The film is all over the place. It feels unfocused and, frankly, messy, yet once you get a feel for its eccentric rhythm you find yourself surrendering to its unconventional mode of telling a story. Much of what you’re told about certain characters, and much of what you doubt is real, suddenly comes into focus when you least expect it. It’s as if everyone, particularly director McDonagh, is having fun playing around with the conventions of movie storytelling.
Plus, it’s very funny. Characters discuss and debate everything whether it’s relevant to the current situation or not. When Walken, whose characters has developed an anti-violent attitide to life, tells Rockwell how violence is good for no one, he says that, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” Rockwell’s response is to state that the saying can’t possibly be true. “There’ll be one guy left with one eye,” he declares. “How’s the last blind guy going to take out the eye of the last guy left?” He has a point.
The female characters, principally Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko, have sadly little screen time, even though they both figure prominantly on the poster as leading players, but like everything else in the film, this is also by design. When Christopher Walken reads parts of Farrell’s screenplay he remarks how undeveloped the female characters are and how he needs to work on them.
Seven Psychopaths is as strange as Christopher Walken’s inflection; it’s unconventional, hilarious, violent, and I have no clue what point it was making, if any, but it’s a cinematic shot in the arm that works, even if, in the real world, you would never want to know any one of these characters.
