Nevertheless, Seven is so down my alley, with the horror/suspense/serial killer stuff that Silence of the Lambs set the standard for. Seven doesn't come anywhere near Silence, but it's not a bad movie at all, even if the plot moves too quickly to resolve itself, thus removing most of the suspense. Until suspense returns with a massive crash with the huge twist ending. An ending which I unfortunately had heard about before I saw it, thus ruining my ability to judge just how surprising or shocking it would have been if I'd seen it as a virgin.

I enjoyed the film, and wrote a quick review about it in the blog when I first saw it, in November of 2003. I'm writing this introduction and the following categorized score in July 2004, but since I've not seen the movie since my first viewing, I think the following scores are pretty close to where they would have been 9 months ago.

Seven
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 6
Horror: 7
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7.5

I'm tempted to give it a higher score in several areas, and I really need to watch it again at some point to evaluate it with a more knowing eye. I hated Gwyneth's character, found Morgan Freeman's very familiar/cliche, and was annoyed at how stupid Brad Pitt's was, which is why the acting/casting score is low. And I've never had the desire to watch it again, despite loving a lot of it (all the serial killer action and concept), so obviously I can't score it too highly on replayability.

That being said, I remember a lot of it fondly, and since my opinion of some movies goes up substantially when I see them for a second time (Pirates of the Caribbean, Kill Bill 1) I should try it. I can't imagine giving it more than a 7.5 overall, since I'm pretty sure I'd be unable to resist fast forwarding over the "Morgan comes to dinner" segments that involved Gwyneth, and a movie I can't watch in its entirety does not deserve an 8. But I really won't know until I try.

November 3, 2003

Brad Pitt is the young/dumb detective, hungry for success and fame and indifferent to inconvenient police rules, and Morgan Freeman is the wise old detective, just a week from retirement, but with more brains in his little finger than the rest of the department seems to have in their entire bodies.  This character dynamic is developed in the first 5 minutes, and never changes throughout the rest of the movie, except that Brad Pitt's character grows (or is shown to be) even dumber than you initially thought he was.

Well, not so much "dumber" as "weaker."  He is a naive fool when it comes to human nature and I can't imagine that he's ever solved a murder that wasn't a freebie; crime of passion, fingerprints everywhere, DNA matching, etc.  I suppose his character is realistic enough; I certainly find myself groaning through the totally unrealistic super-genius cops with infinite resources and time for every case that are presented on TV shows like CSI and Law and Order. So given that, why should a homicide detective who is as dumb as most real people throw me off?

Anyway, all the review discussion I'd ever heard about the movie was that it was incredibly dark and evil and gory and too intense for some viewers. I guess that's true, but since I'm pretty damn dark and gory myself, nothing in it bothered me.  In fact, I thought they were pulling a lot of their punches, not showing most of the bodies or any live action of most of the killings.  They had such cool ideas and set design and such, but it was almost Lovecraftian in the way they avoided showing the actual gore or a good view of the bodies in so many cases.  Couldn't we have had a nice look at Gwynneth's head in the box?  (And that whole section bothered me, since how in the hell did her freshly-decapitated head not entirely soak the thin cardboard box with blood, smell so much like blood that the delivery guy noticed, etc?)

The plot was very clever, especially the last two killings, but I thought a couple of the others were iffy.  The cool thing about the vanity and greed ones were that the murder victims were given a chance to survive, and tortured psychologically.  The Greed lawyer had to cut off a pound of his own flesh, and would be set free if he did and survived.  The Vanity model was mutilated and given the option to kill herself or call for help. Brilliant plotting there.

Lust was clever but sort of pointless, since the killer was the john who was forced to wear the knife strap on, and fuck the whore to death.  The victim was the whore, but what about the innocent (sort of) guy who came to do the fucking?  Why him?  I love that the killer forced him to decide between dying or murdering someone else in an especially painful way, but shouldn't he have been someone famous for not being lustful?  A straying evangelist or something would have really pumped up the irony and cleverness.

The Sloth one was dubious, since the guy was just tied to a bed and killed horribly and slowly. True, he was a bad person and it was a damn clever way to murder, but what was the point?  It wasn't like the murderer found some brilliant way to keep him from getting up, or forced him to make a choice between being non-slothful or dying of laziness.  He just tied him down for a year and kept him alive to suffer all the more.

The Gluttony one was similar, in that the guy was forced at gun point to eat himself to death.  I suppose the irony is that he was so painfully fat in the first place, and the killer just accelerated his eventual and inevitable death from gluttony, but aside from the cleverness and viciousness of it, why bother?  You could pick any non-fat person and kill them in the same way; you'd just miss out on the whole delicious irony of it.  My point is that there should have been some way for the Glutton to potentially survive the event, in a brilliant script.

Envy was pretty straight forward, but brilliant in the execution, since it led directly to the final sin, by the dopey Brad Pitt character himself.  The problem with it was that he was such a fucking idiot during the entire confrontation with the John Doe killer character that I lost all sympathy for him. He was soft and stupid and weak and easily led about by his nose by even the most blatantly-manipulative behavior that I didn't care about him anymore.  He wore his weaknesses on his sleeve, and was stunned when someone used them against him.

I couldn't help but picture him dealing with Hannibal, and laughing at the likely outcome of that.  If you ever thought that maybe Clarice wasn't brilliant in her ability to handle Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs, go watch Seven again and imagine how well Brad Pitt's character would do?  About as well as Miggs did, I'd figure.

Despite his obvious weaknesses, I still thought he'd pull it out at the end and not give John Doe exactly what he wanted by killing him.  I should have realized he was too weak to exercise the self control, but at least my expectations made the ending somewhat of a surprise.  The whole set up of the ending was brilliantly written and plotted, and very satisfying, and in retrospect I can't argue against what happened; it was perfectly in keeping with Brad Pitt's stupid character.  I just get annoyed at weak and dumb characters that I'm supposed to root for, so it's hard for me to enjoy a movie too much that stars one.

And he didn't even carry out his vengeance very well.  A quick kill from a head shot?  FFS, why even bother?  He wants the guy to suffer some, and he's a sitting (kneeling) duck; how about leg, leg, arm, arm, shoulder, shoulder, gut from the side, and leave him to bleed to death in agony?  If you're going to get revenge while simultaneously throwing away your career and ruining your life, at least do it properly.  (Yes, it annoys me.  I said I was annoyed by weak characters.)

I think making Pitt's character a bit smarter would have been better; I'd have rooted for him during the movie, plus the ending would have really been in doubt and therefore all the more shocking.  Or maybe everyone is as self-delusional as me and talked themselves into some suspense, just like I did?

At any rate, it was a pretty good movie overall and I'd recommend it.  It doesn't hold a candle to Silence of the Lambs, in any aspect (plot, gore, writing, dialogue, acting, characters, suspense, ending) but it's a well-made movie and I enjoyed it.

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