Trash

Rating: 1/10 (25 March 2013)

I only ever take the trouble to review movies that I truly despise, and Se7en is one of them. The film is a trite, cliché and asinine piece - whilst possessing some virtues, is composed primarily of sins. A quick note - other reviews seem to be criticising the "excessive" violence and gore in this film - what do you expect from a film about a serial killer? Firstly - the acting is good, for the most part. Freeman is good as the Dashiell Hammet/Raymond Chandler inspired cynical old cop. Brad Pitt overacts every time he is on screen, making his unbearable character even more unbearable. Kevin Spacey does a suitably creepy (albeit cliché) job of portraying a sadistic, masochistic serial killer.
However, my main beefs with the film lies not in the acting, but in the plot. There are plot holes abound (I encourage you to read the review "se7en problems with se7en") but this isn't the only place where the film falls short. The entire story is predictable - as soon as we are introduced to Paltrow's character we know that she's going to be the subject of some nasty work. The final scene has to be one of the biggest anti-climaxes in film history...
The religious fundamentalist angle. Not that I'm overtly sensitive to negative portrayals of religion, but it's getting a bit trite, don't you think? John Doe (And yes, that's the name of the antagonist in this film...) killing so-and-so because the Big Man Upstairs told him so. I mean, why can't we have a serial killer inspired by Nietszche or Stephen Hawkings or Isaac Newton? Why does it always have to be religion? The "tributes" to film noir include the colour palette used (yup, you guessed it, if you were to compress the film into a single frame, then that frame would be mostly black and white), the fashion, the typewriter that Freeman's character uses, the taxis, the rain, the smog, the is-it-New-York-or-Chicago-nameless-city, the well-spoken and well-read central protagonist & antagonist, the endless references (atypical to noir and pulp) to literature such as "Dante's Inferno" But this doesn't come across as some new and profound take on it - as say Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) or the Coenn Brothers (The Big Lebowski, Fargo) managed to do at a similar time, but it just comes across as a constant rehash of lamentable pulp and noir tropes that we've all seen before. It doesn't come across as engaging, entertaining, though provoking or cool - it's boring.
Seek out films such as "The Missing Person" or "Brick" for a much more engaging take on neo-noir.