So I have to admit, I was baffled by the recent release of Will Smith’s movie Seven Pounds. Why? Because I had no idea at all what relevance the title had to the rest of the movie. Normally the title tells you something about what’s going on, or maybe about a main character, but Seven Pounds? What did that have to do with anything?
Thankfully, over the course of the movie, we’ll get at least an idea of just what that whole “seven pounds” thing is. But that really doesn’t answer the main question here—is Seven Pounds worth perfectly good time and money to watch?
Describing the plot is impossible to do without spoilers, since so much of the plot isn’t actually revealed until the ending, so I’m going to have to REALLY pussyfoot around here—basically, an aeronautical engineer is looking for a way to make seven people’s lives better, by any means necessary and at any cost necessary.
There are a lot of choice words and phrases to apply to Seven Pounds. Most of them involve obscenities and a lot of screaming. Some of them involve the little vein on my forehead popping out so far it looks fit to burst. But some of them that are fit for family dinner table consumption are words like:
Overwrought. I really can’t remember the last time I heard so many Drama Screaming Rants in one movie. Seriously—listening to Will Smith cut THREE of them short with a bark of “stop it” sounded almost EXACTLY like when Peter Griffin was dressed up like Jesus in that one episode of Family Guy. And when Will Smith, who has shown himself to be at least a decent actor on several occasions, starts to sound like Seth MacFarlane, you know somewhere the world just split open and the Crack of Doom is shining a dull red.
Confused. It took me better than an HOUR into the movie before I even understood the TITLE. Even worse it took better than an hour before I managed to get a decent sense of the plot out of this. They’re going to space the exposition throughout almost the entire movie, making it one of those strange sort of movies in which you can only watch it forward but understand it backward. In some cases, that’s actually a good thing—it adds to the unexpected nature of things, and actually makes some things, especially in a horror setting, extra creepy for the unexpectedness. But in Seven Pounds’ case, all it does is make an already impenetrable plot all the more obscured.
Preachy. If Will Smith’s character tried to put one more word out there about who deserved what I was going to throw something large, heavy and preferably pointed right into his smug little face. Seriously, this was just the most preachy thing ever—the only way it could have been more so was if Will Smith looked into the camera and said “MESSAGE!” right before he said something preachy, like they did in Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
It’s a bad sign when I spend half a movie perplexed and the other half enraged. Oh, and bored. There was also a lot of boring—I think those were the parts where perplexed and enraged mixed and became kind of a brackish sludge that felt like boring.
The answer, folks, to the question I asked above is an unequivocal no. Emphatically no. I can’t be clearer, this is godawful tripe. This is an overdramatic, overwrought slag heap that practically begs to be put out of its—and my—misery. There is no scrap of comedy in here to separate it from being a vein of melodrama so pure it will likely blow out your drama lobe. Its vague attempts at being a romance are awkward and uneven. It’s a mess. A pure-on mess.
In no way can I recommend this to you unless you’re truly desperate for Will Smith or you’re a masochist and just plain old love the pain of a pompous, overblown wreck of a movie.
