Seven Pounds, eh? How about Seven Adjectives?
Pretentious.
Dreadful.
Plebeian.
Uncomfortable.
Abhorrent.
Insincere.
Weak.
If Seven Pounds were a man, I'd spit in his face. The film is so full of itself that it forgets it's trying to tell a story. So enraptured with it's own supposed "mystery" that it forgets to do anything to make the mystery worth sticking around for. The biggest mystery to me was how much more money Marley & Me would make than this pile of crap($12 million more so far). This is the type of movie I rail against more than most others. A film so full of self importance that any decent performances within are rendered null and void.
The almost always likeable Will Smith plays Ben Thomas. Ben is a man with a mystery. How do we know he's got a mystery? Because he never answers questions. He stares long into the distance for no reason and stays in seedy motels all by himself. For some "mysterious" reason, Ben has decided to help seven people. But only seven deserving people. Ben makes initial contact with these people, and basically after knowing them for thirty seconds he's qualified to make a judgement call on them. That sounds fair. Be good to me for this minute or I won't save your life.
Ben presents himself as an IRS agent, worming his way into the lives of his subjects. He's basically a stalker, and by all rights he should've been tossed in jail, but I guess since that would end the movie pretty damn quick, natural courses of logic take a back seat to the necessities of plot. Ben begins to form a relationship with one of his subjects, Emily Posa, played wonderfully by Rosario Dawson. Emily suffers from congenital heart failure, and Ben plays himself as just a guy who's both interested in easing her burden but also as a man interested in her. In truth, Ben is only interested in the former, a deceit I find utterly comtemptible.
As the two grow closer, Ben becomes less and less willing to share the truth about who he is and why he's doing what he's doing. In fact, this is the aspect of the film I find most annoying. Ben has a secret, I get that. He did something horrible in his past that has forced him to seek penance by helping people. That's fine, and a good starting point for the story. But Ben's inability to share his ultimate method for helping them, or the WHY of it all makes no sense to me. He refuses to answer simple questions, choosing instead to tense up with apparent grief or run away like a girl with a skinned knee. Or worse, just smile that sheepish Will Smith grin and assume that makes everything okay. No, it doesn't. What it feels like to me is that he's keeping the secret from US, but not the people in the film. That shouldn't happen. In the context of the film, there's no reason why he can't divulge some of his secrets. The only reason to do so is to keep the audience from knowing.
We never get a chance to really see why Ben chose the people he chose, as the movie focuses almost completely on Emily and Ben's relationship. The time they spend is the most natural of all, as Dawson and Smith are both accomplished dramatic actors with a natural chemistry. If this had just been about the two of them and left all this "mystery" nonsense behind, I'd be giving thumbs up all over the place. Instead it's buried under the weight of a plot that tries to be so much more than it actually is. A plot that, literally for the first hour of the film, does absolutely nothing. It just sits there, wringing it's hands.
And the ending. Oh, that ending. That controversial finale. I wanted to slap everyone involved in the making of this junk. I wanted to phone everyone on my contacts list and warn them to stay away from this dreck, lest they waste two hours of their lives the way I did. But I didn't. And some of my friends have now seen this crap, and I feel guilty. Maybe, in true Ben Thomas fashion, I'll take those friends to a real movie as an act of penance. I might even pay for it.
4/10
