Seven Psychopaths

The team that brought you In Bruges and The Guard is back, doin' what they do best. (Basically, making you laugh at slightly awkward and/or totally inappropriate things.)

This time we've got Colin Farrell back, but no Brendan Gleason. Instead we have the incomparable Christopher Walken and the always amazing Sam Rockwell. Walken and Rockwell run a dog-napping scheme where Rockwell steals people's dogs and then Walken returns them to collect the reward. (This is a real thing, by the way.)

Farrell is a drunken Irish writer with writer's block. The movie is, of course, very aware that cliché which is the font of some humor and a significant plot point.

This is a typically fun flick—and you should know by now if this sort of thing is your sort of thing—where Rockwell ends up kidnapping a local mob boss's (Woody Harrelson) dog and he really loves his dog!

A fun part of the movie is that it points out who the psychopaths are as you go along. And there is a mix of real and fictitious psychopaths (Farrell being a writer, after all) that keep  you guessing along the way. This ends up feeling a little like meta-humor, though it does so without being campy or cute (as, say, Joss Whedon).

I can't really do much but spoil it, so I'll keep this review short, and just say that it's as good as (and similar in feel to) the McDonagh's previous work.

The Boy was amused. He observed that it kept the humor going all the way through, whereas most comedies tend to have big starts and slow down quickly.