ultimately not so remarkable

Rating: Null/10 (29 January 2003)

Seven was fun but flawed. And I'm not talking about the grammatical errors uttered by Freeman's character, who was supposed to be more Shakespeare-Chaucer than thou. The flaw was a lack of follow-through. The film wants us to identify with the psycho, who's not a Jason or a Freddie or some other really evil beyond-this-reality supercreature, but a vicious deviant who acts out against the things that WE find disgusting. We'd like to cheer him on and see him less psycho, though we won't admit it. Yeah, we want to see the fat man and the lawyer and the drug-dealing pederast go down the tubes, and that's how the film catches us with our moral pants down. But the film doesn't follow through with the come-rage-with-me invitation. Spoiler - Instead, the psycho's murder of the relatively innocent wife of Brad Pitt's character causes us to loosen our alignment with the avenger and to rethink him as a madman. Just when the directors/producers/writers could have taken us to the looking glass, where we'd check our own cruelty and find it linked to our morality, they let us down and deliver another boy-this-bad-guy-really-is-very-unlike-us psycho movie that's strictly standard-issue.