Movies about movies are always a tough nut to crack, with the line between self-aware and self-indulgent getting increasingly blurred as the fourth wall threatens to crumble. We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly emerge from the highly specific subgenre, but Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths might just be one of the most underrated.
Despite winning strong notices from critics and an enthusiastic reception from audiences – especially when you take respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 83 and 71 percent into account – the black comedy crime caper that threw a multitude of genres into its melting pot didn’t quite catch fire at the box office, nor did it make an awards season splash even remotely comparable to the writer and director’s In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, or The Banshees of Inisherin.
Bolstered by an insanely stacked cast that featured Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko, and many more on top of that, Seven Psychopaths finds Farrell’s screenwriter carrying around a catchy title without a story. Naturally, he stumbles upon his narrative when his dog-stealing buddies fall foul of an organized crime boss, ensuring that art could end up imitating life in deadly fashion.
Borderline self-referential without staring directly into the camera, Seven Psychopaths is an undervalued gem that’s been dug up at exactly the right time, with FlixPatrol revealing the crime caper to have surged onto the global most-watched charts of both Chili and Rakuten this week, and it’s not before time.