SEVEN

Rip It Up, Issue 219, 1 November 1995, Page 46

SEVEN

Director: David Fincher

Seven is a disturbing film, a movie to shock the unshockable. The plot is generic Z grade: psycho killer in New York performing random executions around the city, each echoing one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are the detectives assigned to the case.

Perhaps it’s the fault of Kyle Cooper’s virtuoso post-punk titles (this man may well be the Saul Bass of the 90s) that made me expect a little more pace, but Seven is a film that lurches under the weight of dull casting and pseudointellectual pretensions. Brad Pitt is sullen and Morgan Freeman plays it as if he is indeed four days off retirement. There’s interminable literary chit-chat-Blake, Dante, Hieronymous Bosch et al — although Pitt is far from literary when he screams one of the movie’s best lines at the killer: “You’re no Messiah; you’re a Movie of the Week, you’re a fucking T-shirt at best.” The pacing is a major problem (although it does pick up when our sleuths have an identifiable foe to tackle), and I must admit to being very disturbed by the sadistic violence presented. There’s an ingenuity of sorts here, I suppose (a little like de Sade’s listings of perversions in his 120 Days), but it all needs the Grand Guignol relish of a Hannibal Lecter to place them firmly into the land of the comic book. WILLIAM DART