Will our fascination with "evil" never cease?

Rating: 9/10 (10 January 2010)

Seven is brilliant across all Academy Award categories with a few minor flaws such as why, at the end, the antagonist needed to be taken far from the claustrophobic city to a spacious, if poignant setting under rural power lines, in order to make his point? Are we supposed to conclude subconsciously that the urban breakdown of ethical behavior is due to, um, the unalterable march of electric civilization? And I'm not certain that the final two victims fit into the seven deadly sins categories without a pry bar. My main criticism of the film is the unrecognized cliché premise that evil possesses genius, particularly serial psycho killer evil, which, since the Hitchcock's "Psycho", seems to have become an attitudinal paradigm. Hey, people, serial killers are brain damaged schlemiels who don't get caught right away, not due to any innate off the charts Hannibal Lector intelligence, but because law enforcement can be klutzy too. I don't like the social programming that is inherent in this thematic stereotype. Evil is stupid, get over it.