It cuts and slices away, but still follows police-movie formula...

Rating: 6/10 (3 October 2005)

Is Morgan Freeman our greatest living actor? He may in fact be, and his mere presence here (solid, noble, and pure) is reassuring, but even Freeman can't overcome the usual cat-&-mouse/killer-toying-with-detectives stew that "Se7en" serves up. There's a serial killer loose in rainy New York City, and as he mounts his seven grisly crime scenes--modeled after the Seven Deadly Sins--he quickly becomes aware of the two homicide detectives on the case and is enamored of their drive and determination. Most of this is left vague and unexplained; we learn precious little about the psychopath involved except that he's highly literate, educated, with too much strict religion in his background. This is all hoary police-movie fodder, as is the set-up with the detectives: the wise codger about to retire and his cocky new partner with the short fuse. The film mounts the tension well, with staccato glimpses of corpses and gore, but can't escape a fatigued sense of deja vu (I thought mostly of "The Silence of the Lambs"). Brad Pitt gets off to an awkward, hesitant start in his role, but does improve. Freeman is sensational; whether throwing his knife at a dartboard or studying up on literature at the library, he is focused and gripping. The grimy, lust-and-death soaked atmosphere is wallowed in (it's the Big Apple as a Gothic Hell), and certainly it is palpable and captured successfully, but completely off-putting. Words written in blood on the walls...it's too much like real-life crime scenes, and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker isn't clever enough to distract us or cunning enough to help us distinguish the difference (the killer does leave clues, but they are quickly solved). The narrative is a mix of derivative movie-thriller ideas and new-fangled ways of making the viewer as squeamish as possible--it's the old pulling-wings-off-flies number, but on a larger sick-making scale. The film is predictably gruesome, less predictably formula-bound. **1/2 from ****