Fridae

Like last year's metafictional horror-comedy Cabin in the Woods, Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths is a genre piece that's both a loving tribute, lurid pastiche, and sly deconstruction of genre norms, expectations, and cliches. For Seven Pyschopaths, the genre happens to be the LA crime story featuring passionate, violent psychopaths.

Now, it's not as though this hasn't been done before. One might argue that a large part of Quentin Tarrantino's output has been devoted to self-aware, self-mocking crime films. What McDonagh offers though is something that matches Tarrantino in his ambition and surpasses Tarrantino in execution and effect.

Seven Psychopaths is nominally about a washed-up alcoholic screenwriter (Colin Farrell) whose ambition is to write a screenplay for a crime film (also entitled Seven Psychopaths!). Thanks to his alcoholism-induced writer's block, Marty hasn't got a clue about what the film would be about and even the identity and gimmicks of its eponymous psychopaths. That's despite him living in the metaphorical eye of the storm.

While mucking around with his script on psychopaths, the writer is best friends with people who are best described as psychopathic, if not lunatic. His unstable best friend (Sam Rockwell) is an unstable actor who kidnaps dogs and returns them to their owners to claim the reward, and his partner in crime is an old gentleman so genial, he's obviously off-kilter somehow. It helps that the old gentleman is played by Christopher Walken. And somehow, they'll kidnap the pooch of a psychopathic mafia boss, who will stop at nothing to get his beloved back.

Cutting between vignettes that reconstruct Marty's imagination of his fictional characters (who may or may not actually exist in his reality), the backstories about themselves that actual psychopaths tell him when they drop by for tea, and the main drama itself, the film pokes fun at its own baroque structure, highlights the visual and narrative cliches of Hollywood's action and crime films, and questions the assumptions of its own genre.

Marty wants to write a thriller where the first half is drenched in blood and violence and where characters talk things out in the wilderness in the second half. Martin McDonagh delivers a film that's exactly what Marty wants to write, in addition to being uproariously funny as it delivers the violent excesses of Hollywood's crime films while making fun of them.