Seven Pounds.

"Seven Pounds is approximately two hours long, and it spends almost the entirety of that time hiding its premise from you, and wondering why Will Smith is behaving so strangely," writes Paul Matwychuk. "The answer turns out to be both stranger and more banal than you expect. By the standards of normal human behaviour, Smith's plan is nuts - involving identity theft, all sorts of creepy, passive-aggressive stalker behavior, and a climactic bathtub scene that really has to be seen to be believed - but by the standards of 'uplifting' Hollywood dramas, the self-sacrificing saintliness of Smith's motives is depressingly familiar, especially if you've already seen movies like Pay It Forward, The Bucket List or Reign Over Me."

Updated through 12/20.

"Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco." Scott Foundas in the Voice: "Writing at the time, I praised the film for Smith's superb performance and for its willingness to honestly address the social and economic realities of America's underclass. Watching Smith and Muccino's latest collaboration, Seven Pounds, I marveled (to paraphrase the great Jermaine Jackson) that something so right could go so wrong."

Muccino "seems to think he's in Ingmar Bergman territory, but he's actually made the longest, most dour episode of My Name is Earl imaginable," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

"The film plays like an exercise in annoying the viewer, deliberately confusing not for any meaningful purpose, but merely because if any of our questions were answered in a timely fashion, there wouldn't be any movie left," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.

"The most morbid feel-good movie of the season, Seven Pounds takes the notion of self-sacrifice and pushes it beyond an act of nobility into the realm of a last-chance suicide mission," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "While I can't bring myself to give away the revelations of Smith's character, which are the entire reason this film exists, I can say that the film is about giving of one's self to the last drop of blood. The result is a pretty looking, sugarcoated Hollywood confection that won't bring itself to admit that it's about a ghoul dancing on the edge of his grave."

"Though the heavyness sometimes turns into heavy-handedness, particularly in the film's central romance between Will Smith's martyr and Rosario Dawson's victimized girl-next-door, overall it's an impressive, often moving, work about penance and sacrifice," finds the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik.

Allison Samuels talks with Smith for Newsweek.

Updates, 12/18: "A glib, charming movie star - but resourceless actor - Smith must think scrunching-up his face and looking worried for two hours shows serious concentration and emotional gravity," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Apparently, he is unaware of the ways that movies and movie stars communicate depth and sincerity."

The film "soon turns from an intriguing investigation of morality and grief into an exercise in maudlin excess," writes Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper.

Interviews with Dawson: Brent Simon (Vulture) and Chris Willman (Los Angeles Times).

Updates, 12/20: Before clicking on Stephanie Zacharek's name, you should see Salon's editor's note: "This review contains spoilers, from the first sentence on. Seriously." Since I'll very likely never see this movie - ever - I read on, and I did find a sentence safe to cut-n-paste here: "As holiday heartwarmers go, Seven Pounds is so unintentionally ghoulish, it makes Black Christmas look like It's a Wonderful Life."

"Frankly, though," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, as if in response to SZ's first sentence, "I don't see how any review could really spoil what may be among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made. I would tell you to go out and see it for yourself, but you might take that as a recommendation rather than a plea for corroboration. Did I really see what I thought I saw?"

"I will not offer a review of this film, as that would be a waste of the little time we have together in this review space," begins Charles Mudede in the Stranger. "But to those who do watch Seven Pounds and see its shocking 'revelation,' I want to offer this reading or decoding of its narrative: The movie is about the death of the black male."

The Oregonian's Michael Russell:

As DK Holm recently pointed out - citing examples ranging from James Cagney to Steven Seagal - "actors can be just as much the auteurs behind their films as directors." This seems especially true of male stars prone to action roles: Why, despite a rotating roster of directors, is Mel Gibson always getting tortured? Why does Tom Cruise have a long streak of films in which he learns a vocational skill or wears a mask? Why is Seagal always playing guitar and yakking about the environment? Why is Harrison Ford always rescuing his wife and holding up his Index Finger of Doom?

We can now definitively add to this list Will Smith - who in Seven Pounds continues the lonely-messed-up-savior streak he started with I Am Legend and Hancock.

"Having, with The Pursuit of Happyness, already proven himself capable of bringing raw sensitivity to mawkish material, there was modest reason to hope that Smith might again pull off the same feat in his second collaboration with that film's director, Gabriele Muccino," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical. "No such luck. Seven Pounds is misguided mush from the moment go, a deliberately muddled bit of inspirational pap that masks its inherent silliness with structural obliqueness and, worse still, affords Smith scant opportunities to infuse his character with authentic humanity."

For the New Republic's Christopher Orr, this is "a dour, morally beclouded film that confuses generosity and grief, self-abnegation and self-annihilation."

"The trick of Seven Pounds, a k a Extreme Makeover: Will Smith Edition, is that it takes the most self-serving redemption conceit imaginable and converts it into a tale of Christ-like sacrifice and grace," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "It's a con job that feels like a precisely attenuated work of art, elegantly weaving flashbacks and ellipses into the story in an effort to conceal how shamelessly manipulative it is in the end. And as always, Smith comes out a winner."

"The message of Seven Pounds (other than, Don't text-message while driving) is that even the most depressive person can find a way to make other people happy," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "If that doesn't sound like a movie to buoy your Christmas spirit, ask yourself this: How often do you sit through a film's closing credits so you have a little private time to wipe away the tears?"

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2008 1:58 PM