Seven Pounds Movie Review: 118 Minutes of Incoherence

First published on American Madness on 19 December 2008.
Republished here with a minor editorial adjustment that does not affect content.

Scene: Ben Thomas (played with unending weepiness by Will Smith), despondent, in close-up makes a 911 call to report his own impending suicide.

Cut to: Ben swimming in the blue Pacific. His voiceover, in pressing sadness, informs us, “In seven days God created the world. And in seven seconds I shattered mine.” Yet I recall God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. And what about those seven seconds? No explanation is ever offered.

Cut to: Ben making a phone call to the customer service center of a mail-order meat company. The employee handling his call is Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind man without an angry bone in his body, as evidenced by his unwillingness to strike back when Ben released a tirade of insults over the phone. This will prove to be Ben’s test of Ezra to discover if he is worthy - worthy of what is the mystery that unravels over the course of 118 difficult minutes.

Hancock Movie Review: A Different Kind of Hero

Will Smith as John Hancock, looking smug after carelessly destroying a freight train.

Hancock is sort of a “What if…” movie with regard to superheroes. What if there were a superhero who was good, but rude and offensive and generally left more of a mess in his wake than was worth the good deed done? It also rather amusingly deals with the problem of birds getting in the way of a hero in flight, a subject never broached by any incarnation of Superman. John Hancock, played by the reliably charismatic Will Smith, is such a guy. He’s got the strength and flying ability of Superman, but none of the finesse. When he takes off and lands he leaves giant holes in the street. He drinks most of the time and is generally regarded as a public nuisance. He saves lives not to the final applause of astonished onlookers, but to jeers and sneers (and a lot worse) of a public that is tired of his antics.

I Am Legend Movie Review: A Legend for the Wrong Reasons

Robert Neville (Will Smith) and Sam stare down the Dark Seekers.

In the opening moments of I Am Legend, the 2007 film based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, Robert Neville (Will Smith) sneaks up on a deer grazing on the streets of New York after chasing it away from a scampering herd in midtown Manhattan. Suddenly a female lion pounces on the deer, stealing what would have been several nice meals for the presumed last man on Earth. The lioness is swiftly followed by her cubs and a stoic male waiting for his share and staring down Neville until he decides the better part of valor is to live to hunt another day. In this sequence the hunter striving for survival is supplanted by a different type of hunter also acting out of self-preservation, suggesting the theme of the source novel – a promise the film never lives up to.