Admittedly, this was later modified to 'the best movie ever made in colour.' Clearly this film would have to be viewed without benefit of popcorn in due homage to the best movie ever made in colour. More importantly, the movie got a five-star rating in EMPIRE: the final accolade. And even the reliably discerning CRIME TIME appeared to endorse the general acclaim.
Therefore this was something I couldn't afford to miss, even though the High Concept formula of seven murders committed upon the basis of the Seven Deadly Sins seemed the result of a coke-induced Hollywood thinktank on a very bad day.
As a farcical comedy, SEVEN is entirely amusing, if low on Keystone capers and good jokes. As a post SILENCE OF THE LAMBS urban policier dealing with the dark psyche of the mass murderer it is entirely risible. I giggled so much that several members of my family looked as if they might take up serial killing as a career too.
SEVEN is not only a bad movie, it is also a very dishonest one. And immoral, if I can be so uncool as to mention matters of morality in works of popular entertainment these days. It also commits the worst crime of all: serial boredom. It is better to be bad than boring. SEVEN, however, manages to do both: it is a spectacular achievement in dullness and predictability.
It seems that admirers of the film have been seduced by its style and its production values. If deeply derivative, it is well acted, designed and directed. Sustaining a moody, mean-streets look, its urban locales convince, even if the film noir rain, graffiti, dark places and sounds of the city are not exactly new to the screen and have been executed with greater flair and frisson in earlier works over a number of decades in European as well as American movies.
Here the gritty realism is laid on with a dragline, as if the director had just done a short course in forties American cinema. It looks as if he received a banal, contrived, designer screenplay cooked up by some wannabe from UCLA and wondered how on earth he could make such a hoked-up, unconvincing hotchpotch look remotely real.
The director did pretty well in convincing otherwise reasonably well adjusted people that they were not having their intelligence insulted by his movie. However, the film might have been more credible if it had been set, as with Polanski's CHINATOWN, in sunny L·A, with its pseudo-smartness and stucco patios and archways. Then at least it would be possible to perceive this hokum as just a fairground ghost-train of cheap ghoulish thrills.
What little tension there is relies entirely upon a mawkish squeamishness of response in the audience. This is the most tawdry aspect of the film. What Deadly Sin comes next, who's in line for the chop, and how will they GET the chop? The movie deals in a lip-smacking snuff-movie pornography, inviting the audience to savour the anticipated torture, cruelty and slow death of victims who are kept at arms-length from us, anonymous characters whom we are deliberately prevented from identifying with.
This tackiness of approach plays insidiously upon our own mortal failings, yet trivialises the tragedy of violent death and its reality in our society by reducing it to Agatha Christie style crossword-puzzle speculation: how appropriate is the brutal punishment meted out to each Deadly Sinner on the agenda? What constructed niceties of terror and pain will the next Sinner be put through? The camera sweeps down corridors and through Chinese-boxes of rooms, press-ganging us into ameliorating scenes of wretched horror.
The film plays dishonestly upon a voyeuristic fascination with the details of torture and cruelty, both to wind-up the audience and to satisfy its morbidity in a vertigo which combines revulsion with sleazy allure: I don't want to know, but- okay, tell me anyway.
Yet unlike say Hitchcock the film does not confront the audience with its own collusion, culpability and residual sadism. It simply exploits the darkside in the audience, whilst posing as a serious examination of contemporary themes, and therefore renders itself specious and immoral.
And the film wears its spurious thematics on its sleeve with mindless solemnity and portentousness.
Of course, all this is taking the film more seriously than it deserves. Basically, it is a piece of gaudy melodrama. The two cops are familiar stereotypes. Morgan Freeman's characterisation is mildly racist, although I doubt if the brainpadded casting executives will have realised it: a worldly-wise world-weary Uncle Tom figure, a bachelor, once in love, it didn't work out, that's Life, Death and the American Dream, poor melancholy mister. As Marx Brothers writer S J Perelman put it: I'm sorry I made me sad. And, of course, Morgan's going to retire in SEVEN DAYS! Except we know you won't really, will you, Morgan?
After all, someone's got to do the job, go down those mean city streets with that grizzled, I've-seen-it-all-before countenance of Bogart's compassionate cynic. Who else is there, Morgan? Hopefully a cop more interested in crime-prevention than pontificating.
The picture naively teases us with the idea that Morgan or Brad Pitt could be the killer. Brad's your rookie, bit of a loose cannon, likeably wild, a bit naff, Clint Eastwood in a sweaty undershirt. So we have Morgan and Brad reluctantly teamed up together. Recognise them as a duo? Not unfamiliar. The movie owes more than a little to Don Siegel's classic DIRTY HARRY and countless other movies.
Brad has a nice little wife, sweet smile, teaching grade five in High School, of course, hates the Big Bad city, naturally, pregnant, surprise-surprise. 'I need to talk to you, Morgan,' she treens. After one tv-dinner Morgan becomes her coffee-bar confidant, but then he's black and wise, remember, a man of Few Words and Hidden Depths.
What does she want? Morgan's worldly advice, when all the time we thought she was going to come onto him. Luckily Morgan has a Secret Past and the platitudinous homilies abound. She's grateful: 'Thank you, Morgan.' Butter-wouldn't-melt, shy little smile. Come back, Madonna, we need you after all.
Mrs Pitt is so coy, sweet and Apple Pie that the least the killer could do was decapitate her and do us all a favour, especially Brad. However, the ultimate punishment for Brad would have been the long-term purgatory of having to continue married life with this sanitised Julie Andrews mutant.
It's easy to guess that Wifey is being lined up for the big sleep. She's too much in evidence in the picture, yet insufficiently developed as a character to be dramatically significant. She's a marked lady, and the filmmakers have my entire sympathy and support. My only criticism being that we have to wait too long for her inevitable demise.
Morgan and Brad don't do too much detecting. Instead they ride around the streets piously ruminating on urban alienation, as if this is news. T S Eliot has a lot to answer for. Nobody cares anymore, it's a city of lost souls, and so on and so forth. If the serial killings were based upon the Seven Deadly Truisms, Morgan and Brad would be top of the hitlist.
It's also curious that these two inappropriate gumshoes alone are left to solve these bizarre murders with all the attendant newsroom publicity. No criminal psychologist on board, no specialist murder squad, no FBI involvement.
But get this. The killer has been borrowing books from the library, no less. He has a private income, the hackneyed get-out clause of movies like this, in case we ask the awkward question: how does anyone have the time and resources to conduct such an exhaustive, elaborate and painstaking series of killings? Despite evidence of dusty leather-bound De Sadian tomes in his apartment, the killer regularly nips down to the library to pay his overdue fine.
This fastidious, meticulous murderer, planning everything down to the finest detail, deploying a tortuous trail of brainteasing clues, leaves himself open to discovery over the cost of a secondhand book. Believable, huh? And the breakthrough comes through a paid informant, who has access to FBI files denied the cops. A one-page computer printout locates the killer, who turns up with his shopping while Morgan and Brad are at his apartment, the killer having presumably failed to notice their cop-car parked in the street outside.
Granted, the movie is fast-footed in covering up its very many holes, mostly through its pretentious and pious air of fatuous Significance, which dares us to ask such banal questions as: why does the killer cut off his fingertips? The filmmakers hope that the gruesomeness of the act will distract us from wondering - why on earth does the man do such a silly thing?
To stop the cops locating his fingerprints? Yes, of course, sorry. What about wearing a pair of gloves then, mate? It is a fact that fingerprint specialists have problems in establishing identification from even a good print. And if you have no criminal record, so what anyway? Fingerprints are meaningless.
Nevertheless, the guy cuts off his fingertips. 'He's been doing it for some time,' a cop mutters ominously. We obediently cower back, horror, horror, just imagine that! He cuts off his fingertips! The guy's nuts anyway, but not as nutty as those who leave their brainpower in the powder-room and swallow this asinine nonsense whole.
We are being asked to believe that a man with seriously mutilated hands can kidnap, hold hostage, torture, maim and murder by slow death seven people over a seven-day period and then engage in a high-speed chase through a tenement block, make good his escape, mount a conveniently situated truck in the pouring rain outside and hold a trained cop at gunpoint. The guy wouldn't be able to hold a gun. He wouldn't even be able to take down a book from a library shelf. Nuts, or not.
There are holes in the best thrillers. Melodrama is dependent upon our willing suspension of disbelief. But there is hardly a single scene in SEVEN which sustains any credibility whatsoever. And this matters in a movie which postulates contemplation of contemporary life. If the raw dramatic material is so dishonestly constructed in pursuit of gratuitous horror then it's pretty certain that we have a deeply flawed and fraudulent movie.
Fat Boy is the first victim. Nevermind that, given his extreme obesity, he was probably carbohydrately challenged through neurosis or glandular illness rather than gluttony: there he is, face-down in his baked beans and serve him right. It is an image of such grotesque absurdity that a belly-laugh is all that is possible. The cops return to the scene of the crime to discover the word 'Gluttony' scrawled in grease across a wall. Don't the filmmakers know that in a murder investigation the police take even the floorboards apart? It's fine-toothcomb time. No way would this have gone previously undiscovered.
None of the victims seem to have had lives outside their murderous imprisonment. A man is held hostage for a year, even though the killings are supposed to be agendaised within seven days. Nobody misses him, his hand is cut off, no noise, no screams, the killer can function with apparent impunity. Sloth awakens from the dead and rears up, in the most hilarious moment of the film. The man would have been dead for yonks, but he is made to survive just long enough to fit into the contrived seven-day murder pattern.
Can anyone really take this seriously? Apparently so.
In this movie, an intense round-the-clock murder investigation concerning daily killings gives way to pseudo-philosophising over glasses of red wine. The cops, busy with navel-contemplation, don't seem to feel it important to interview those acquainted with the victims, a line of enquiry which might offer leads.
Except the lawyer's wife. The sole, one-dimensional purpose of her scene is to reveal a Vital Clue, which actually leads nowhere other than to provide further bouts of calculated if unconvincing nastiness along the storyline's circular switchback of grubby malevolence. Although distressed and traumatised, she still manages to notice, through her tears and in an average-sized photograph, the momentous fact that a picture in her apartment is hanging upsidedown.
A surprising and fortuitous presence of mind given her grief-stricken state, especially when the eagle-eyed cops, trained in observational skills, didn't register this incongruity at all. But then, they're only cops, they know nothing about art. Even though Morgan reads books and listens to classical music he still can't pronounce 'De Sade' correctly.
The great American thriller writer, Raymond Chandler, said that the kind of murder which really bothers the cops is the one that happens at the bottom of the street, unmotivated, just for kicks, violence which is spontaneous and unplanned. The murderer who has been very cute, very smart and too clever by half is dead easy to detect. But not for these potato-brain cops.
Much has been made of the fact that the killings occur off-screen. This supposed subtlety permits us to imagine the process of slow death by torture for ourselves. Thank you very much. I'm glad these filmmakers have such a high opinion of our ability to reenact the psychopathic propensities of serial killers.
In fact the film leaves very little to the imagination: the murders are quite graphically described, aided and abetted by those grim scenes-of-crime snapshots and peeks of the squalid aftermath of murder. Again, the appeal is to the mordantly salacious, whilst failing to turn this around upon the audience.
But what would be the effect of showing the killings? The entire artifice of the movie would collapse in an instant. The guy is going to kill you anyway. How do you choose? A bullet in the head or slow and painful death by eating so much that your stomach explodes? How do you choose? A bullet in the head or elect to cut off a pound of your own flesh and bleed slowly to death?
And how is it possible to cut off a pound of your own flesh? Is it physically feasible? Did the killer get the scales out and weigh the meat? The moment you think about it the scenario is exposed for the con it really is. But the last thing this movie wants you to do is to think.
In a blatant ripoff of DIRTY HARRY, SEVEN's killer is surrendered to the police. He seems to know exactly where Morgan and Brad will be at any given time - except when they're visiting his apartment - but their lacklustre police routine wouldn't make that difficult. The guy is covered with blood. He's just taken a cardboard box down to a courier company, his fingertips dripping with blood. 'Oh, good afternoon, sir, had a bit of an accident, have we? Maybe you need a bandaid or two.' But why bother razoring off your fingertips if you're going to give yourself up anyway?
This is the build-up to the great un-Hollywood climax. The police strike a deeply unlikely deal with a killer who has mountains of evidence stacked against him, but nevermind, anything goes in this picture. Wifey's head turns up in the cardboard box courtesy of Red Star. Her head has been hanging around the depot for a day or so, but there is very little blood, no fluid or brain-leakage, the box is not wet or dampened, even stained. There appears to have been no physical decomposition nor, apparently, is there any smell. The decapitated head arrives as if from Betterwear.
It isn't clear what Deadly Sin Wifey has committed. Breathing? I could mention quite a few more, but the filmmakers are silent on the matter.
The shallowness of SEVEN is finally confirmed by its synthetic twist-in-the-tail climax: the killer himself will be the seventh victim, his sin Envy. Except, since he's done away with Wifey, there's nothing to be envious of anymore, is there? For all their sociological pretensions, the filmmakers throw in their hand with this totally implausible, concocted finale.
The killer has positioned Brad as his executioner, and that's fine by us. Shooting's too good for him anyway, even though he's provided us with all manner of inventive diversions and, despite the slip-up over the library books, has a brilliant sense of timing. He can even get Red Star to deliver on the dot. However, the problem seems to be that if Brad shoots him Brad will then, despite all mitigating provocation, end up as much a bad lot as the killer. As EVIL as the killer. Hmm.
Consequently, Morgan wants to save Brad from himself. He throws down his gun, in the hope that Brad will follow suit. Morgan's time-stained knowledge of human nature seems temporarily to have deserted him, but the ways of Morgan are passing strange.
Were Morgan less witless, or less a prisoner of his screenwriter's gauche manipulations, he would fire a bullet into Brad's leg and immobilise him. But that would spoil the great un-Hollywood ending. Brad goes through a well-acted trauma of some duration. But what are YOU doing meanwhile, Morgan? Pick up your gun, Morgan, put Brad out of action! Okay, then rush the guy, ground him. Save his soul!
But Morgan just stands there and does nothing. The camera cannily keeps Morgan out-of-shot in case we realise that Brad, in his weakened, desperately confused and distressed state, could easily be contained by any cop trained in unarmed combat, even the hapless Morgan, even without his gun.
And so the film delivers the most traditional of Hollywood endings: Brad kills the bastard.
But what if Brad didn't shoot him dead? That would induce the most dreadful mental torture in the killer: an unrequited living-death for his Deadly Sin of Envy. That would confound the killer and cheat audience expectations too. That WOULD be un-Hollywood. But the filmmakers know what the public want: blood, revenge and violent death. And Brad must do it. That lets everyone off the hook, mostly the audience, who remain unconfronted with their own rabid and violent impulses.
Brad's action is perfectly understandable, even given the unlikelihood of the circumstances. So what's all the fuss about? Poor old Brad is carted off in the back of the cop-car, symbolically replacing the killer.
The film disingenuously links Brad with the killer in a half-baked doppelganger motif. Certain movies, such as Michael Mann's MANHUNTER and Sidney Lumet's THE OFFENCE, have disturbingly themed the idea that the capacity for violence and murder resides within us all and that this brutalisation most particularly affects the cop in pursuit of the killer.
Whatever his shortcomings, the callow Brad cannot be equated to a man who has committed such a bestial string of calculated murders. Brad responds with the unpremeditated emotional upheaval of a guy who has lost a loved one, put to death in a very brutal fashion, a ritual beheading. And executed by a man without any fingertips. After all these murders, it's surprising he had any fingers left at all.
The film's desperate and transparent quest for meaningfulness is illustrated by this token alignment between Brad and the killer. The movie is a fake, needing to conceal its counterfeit content under the King's New Clothes of apparent depth and meaning.
Now: how about a serial killer who murders the filmmakers of crass serial killer movies? That's one hell of a cute concept and nobody's done it! But it's going to have to be smart, so let's brainstorm.
What about motive? Is that important? No, but I guess we ought to have one. How about toenail-curling tedium induced by fraudulent and contrived serial killer movies? That's a fresh angle. Who's the first victim? The overpaid screenwriter chokes to death beside his swimming-pool. The killer, a failed writer, makes him eat the pages of his very bad serial-killer screenplay. Victim Two: the rip-off director who thinks he's a born-again Jean-Pierre Melville.
Will it work? Sure it will, those suckers will buy anything. And end up thinking they've seen a profound movie.