If you think the post-Tarantino hardboiled gangster movie has been done to death, well, wait till you see "Seven Psychopaths." This does to the gangster flick what Dali did to clocks.
Anglo-Irish playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh's sophomore film — after the inventive hit-man comedy "In Bruges" — spends a lot of time chasing its tail: It wants to be a chatty, ironic gangster movie, but that's been done to death, right, so let's just tear it up and start over and take the mickey out of the whole, tired genre ... But wait, wouldn't it be really awesome to see hard-nut Woody Harrelson in a stare-down with icy cold Christopher Walken? Yes, that would be cool, so are we making the gangster movie or not?
That's a tension that "Seven Psychopaths" carries, hilariously, to its final reel. Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic screenwriter named Marty who in typical Hollywood fashion has the high-concept title for his screenplay — "Seven Psychopaths" — but no actual story. Problem is, he's only got one psycho, and that's a Buddhist who doesn't believe in violence; and so Marty aspires, rather hopelessly, to make a pacifist violence flick. (Of course, that's arguably already been done, by Zhang Yimou and Jet Li in "Hero.")