Seven Psychopaths is an odd film.

I've gotten into the habit lately of not watching trailers, or at least not finishing them, once I've decided I'm interested in a movie. If I get a little ways into it and start to think "this looks fun," I stop watching, and pick up where I left off in a theater seat somewhere. This has generally been a positive trend, and it's one I'll continue. The downside is, I might have gotten the wrong read off of what I saw in the trailer when I decided Seven Psychopaths was one of those films.

In the interest of this post, I stopped after writing the above paragraph to go watch the trailer. Nope, I got the right read alright. The trailer is just not particularly indicative of what happens in the movie.

For instance, here's something you probably didn't catch in the trailer, as it's underplayed to the point of not being there: the whole movie is a Charlie Kaufman-esque "a character in the movie is writing the movie you're seeing" kind of thing. Shit, man, that should have been in the trailer, that'd be the defining selling point for me. Any degree of meta-commentary, from an unreliable narrator to an impossibly on-the-nose genre savvy farce, is my candy. Can't get enough of it.

The problem, and this is the wonky foundation upon which the rest of the movie is built, is that it doesn't play at all. The relationship between the movie we're watching, the movie the character is writing, and the stories the character is pulling from his real life to use in the movie he's writing that we're seeing, starts off baffling and never gets any easier to understand.

The actual events portrayed in the movie seem to untangle as follows - this is an attempt to explain the movie at large, not the plot as it occurs: a writer, Marty (Colin Farrell, one assumes adopting the nickname of writer/co-director Martin McDonagh) is trying to get his screenplay off the ground, for which he has a title - Seven Psychopaths - but little else. He semi-enlists the help of his best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell), insofar as Billy comes up with a couple great ideas for psychopaths to fill out the roster. One is a psychopathic paroled murderer-cum-born-again-Christian who was tormented by the father of his victim until killing himself with a knife to the throat, the other is a mob assassin who only kills fellow members of the mob, leaving behind a Jack of Diamonds playing card at the scene. Billy, it should be noted now, is partnered up with a man named Hans (Christopher Walken), and together they kidnap dogs to collect rewards for finding them. Billy steals the dog of his girlfriend's other boyfriend, a tough guy named Charlie (Woody Harrelson), ostensibly because Billy doesn't like the way Charlie treats said girlfriend. Charlie turns out to be a psychopath himself, but doesn't make the list at this point, as Marty doesn't know about him yet. At this point, Marty has two psychopaths, and thusly Billy posts an ad in the paper calling all psychopaths to tell Marty their stories. From this we get one additional psychopath, Zachariah (Tom Waits), who in a previous life was a serial killer killer. Two "killers," there - he killed serial killers and only serial killers. Cute, right? Along the way we end up with a cobbled together invention of fourth (fifth) psychopath, a Viet Kong Catholic priest hellbent on revenge, and... I think that's it in terms of psychopaths, a word I'm sick of typing.

Turns out, the murderer-cum-born-again-Christian is Hans, and the Jack of Diamonds mob killer is Billy - who took the ideas for these psychopaths from his real life and from Hans's. Once Woody Harrelson ends up in Marty's world, that brings us up to five. I don't want to be nitpicky about the number of psychopaths, but I do want to be nitpicky about the story that's being told.

Because with end-of-the-credits retrospect, we learn that the chain of events for Marty went as follows: has idea for a movie called Seven Psychopaths, a psychopath he happens to know (but didn't know was a psychopath) gets involved, and things avalanche into a whole big terrifying problem filled with psychopaths, which he later uses as the story for the movie Seven Psychopaths, which we are watching. This is complicated and difficult to understand, in terms of cause and effect, but not the most alienating framework to ever happen in a movie. And it plays, it should be noted, without ever breaking the fourth wall or using narration - though there is a lengthy scene wherein an insane Billy pitches an ending for the "movie," using a mixture of characters invented for Marty's script and characters from which they are currently running, and interpersonal conflicts invented for Marty's script and interpersonal conflicts for which they are currently scheming.

This, all of this, is rather fucking insane. And that might be the biggest problem - I wonder if this movie would have worked better as a slightly different beast. Entirely insane, not rather insane. Not a whipsmart, too-clever-by-half Kiss Kiss Bang Bang-ian character piece, but a trippy, Gilliam/Lynch reality-comes-apart movie. It could almost use the exact same script, with the exception of Marty himself. The not-quite involved, not-quite innocent Mary Sue character that reminds us all too clearly of Charlie Kaufman, the character in Adaptation, would need to be more of a Raoul Duke, Hunter S. Thompson sort of deal. And the questions of "what the fuck is going on here" would seem more like stylistic "reality unbends around a character we don't know if we can believe" sort of choice, instead of being... well, confusing, mostly.

But now I'm Monday Morning Quarterbacking.

This movie has a lot to offer. Many actors you love to watch chew up the scenery chew up the scenery - least of all, oddly, Christopher Walken, who actually ends up in a beautiful and sympathetic place by the time things wrap up - and many of the lines are laugh-out-louders. And if you stop trying to figure out what the hell is going on, you might just be better off, and I fault you none for it. Alas, I felt problems with pacing throughout the filmwatching experience, where I couldn't tell if the story was on or off the ground or if what I was watching was related to everything else I was watching, and my experience suffered for it.

I guess I'm really disappointed in this, the more I think about it. It's just sort of a mess. His previous film, In Bruges, was amazing and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I feel bad about shitting on this movie. But it turns out, all the Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, funny lines, meta humor and clever ideas in the world can't get me over the hump on Seven Psychopaths. The movie that we end up with is an oddball - glowing with promise ultimately unfulfilled.

And god damn, I want to see the movie the trailer was made for. That one sure looks like a winner.