In 2008, Colin Farrell collaborated with writer/director Martin McDonagh on what was to be both Farrell’s finest performance and the best film of the year: In Bruges. It’s a hard act to follow, but Seven Psychopaths is a good try; this time Farrell is Marty, presumably a figure for McDonagh, a Hollywood screenwriter struggling with the script for a new crime picture that is part Tarantino, part Pinter.
Marty’s friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is eager to help – perhaps a little too eager, since he places an ad in the paper inviting actual psychopaths to present themselves and tell their stories. Meanwhile, Billy and his mentor Hans (Christopher Walken) have a lucrative side business: they kidnap rich people’s dogs, keep them for a day or so, and then return them for a reward. This backfires when they kidnap the beloved shih tzu of vengeful crime lord Charlie (Woody Harrelson).
And so the movie unspools, jumping between Marty’s imagined script, Billy’s embellishments, the recollections of the psychopaths they talk to, and Charlie’s relentless pursuit. The script is a clever fusion of revenge-movie tropes and the kind of philosophy bantered about by the In Bruges hitmen, with amusing commentary on crime movies sprinkled throughout (“you can blow a woman’s head off, but don’t hurt the animals”). The whole cast rises to the script, but Rockwell shines as a man who is truly unhinged, even in comparison to the psychopaths around him.
In the wrong hands, Seven Psychopaths could have been a smug and hypocritical genre exercise; instead it is smart, funny, and genuine, and well worth a look.
Over the last few years I have been reading the Inspector Rebus novels of Scottish writer Ian Rankin, whose works account for something like a quarter of all mystery book sales in the UK. I have never been a compulsive mystery novel reader, finding many of them to be tedious; but when I find a character and supporting cast that I like, be it Rebus, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, I will gladly follow.
It’s been a while since I last read a story written and drawn by comics veteran Howard Chaykin, and coincidentally I picked up the original hardcover collection of his series Black Kiss a couple of weeks ago. His new book Marked Man is a revenge story originally serialized in Dark Horse Presents, about an assassin called Mark LaFarge who is double-crossed by a client. He survives an attack on his home and goes into hiding, planning payback for the deaths of his wife and son. Along the way he attracts the interest of a female police detective, who is unable to prevent Mark’s endgame because a security guard won’t let her into a male-only resort.
