Good film with a great ending

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2016)

"Seven" or "Se7en" is an American movie from over 20 years ago already that features 4 Academy Award winners playing the main characters: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey, even if none of them had an Oscar when this film was made. Spacey won the very same year though and it was an amazing 1995 for him. Fittingly, these over 2 hours here are at their best in the last half hour when he visibly enters the picture. I am fairly certain that the greatness of these last 30 minutes clouds many people's judgments about this movie. Lets be honest. The first 1.5 hours are really solid, but not great. The idea of letting a killer commit his murder in style of the 7 deadly sins is a nice one, but the execution in detail left me wanting for more of course. I am not the greatest Pitt or Paltrow fan, but they play their characters well here. And Morgan Freeman is a delight as always for sure.
I personally believe that if they had managed to keep the first three quarters of the film more essential and possibly kept the movie 15-20 minutes shorter, this may have been an even more rewarding watch. The director is David Fincher by the way and after a prolific career of music video direction (and Aliens 3), this film here was his big breakthrough that turned him into one of the A-list directors in Hollywood, which he still is today. Nonetheless, I have to be a bit critical about this film here. IMDb has it almost in the top20 films of all time based on the rating and that is very exaggerated. The critics consensus seems more appropriate. It is probably among the 10 best films of 1995, but nowhere near being an all-time great film. As much as I liked the final chapter here, I would need to be very generous already to call it an all-time great ending. Still, the film is worth seeing at least once for sure and I recommend it, especially if you like the actors.