THE press kit describes “Seven Pounds,” a Will Smith weepie that should include diabetes testing in the admission price, as a “gripping mystery.” The only mystery here is how many people are actually going to pay good money to watch this preposterous romantic melodrama, which uses a fractured narrative to cloud an absurd plot that would probably be laughed off the screen if it were presented in a straightforward manner.
Smith’s reunion with director Gabriele Muccino (the far more tolerable “The Pursuit of Happyness”) is basically “Pay It Forward” meets “Babel.”
The star, whose self-grandiosity has grown exponentially in each recent succeeding role – he turned out to be literally a god in “Hancock” – has finally surpassed his pal Tom Cruise in the ego department.
The world’s biggest star (Smith, that is) plays an extremely depressed IRS agent who goes around looking for seven people to help in a very major way.
At one point, he gives away his oceanfront estate to a battered mom – it’s up to us to figure out how this poor woman is going to be able to afford the astronomical real-estate taxes.
Before I get to the spoilers – very soon – I don’t think I’m giving away too much by revealing that one of his beneficiaries is a beautiful but dying heart patient played by Rosario Dawson.
Those of you who have seen the trailer – or thought about exactly what the title means – maybe have already figured out the gruesome, vaguely O. Henry-ish twist here, and there are additional clues in the first 20 minutes.
But if you really insist on seeing “Seven Pounds” against my best advice, God bless – and PLEASE STOP READING NOW.
REALLY. GO AWAY.
Because I’m going to have to reveal some “secrets” to take a scalpel to this baby.
The sad truth is that if you laid this movie out chronologically – and maybe if you don’t – not a whole lot of it makes any sense.
Smith is just posing as an IRS agent – he’s an aerospace engineer who was behind the wheel in an automobile accident that killed his wife and six strangers.
After a while of moping around, he donates a kidney to his ailing brother (Michael Ealy) – the real IRS agent – and decides that donating organs is a gift that keeps on giving. How Christmas-y.
If this sounds like one of those unbearable Robin Wiliams movies from the late ’90s, well, its morose, New-Agey philosophizing is not all that far removed from “What Dreams May Come.”
I’m not really sure exactly who will enjoy watching Will Smith take his life with a poisonous jellyfish in an ice-packed motel bathtub, even on cable TV at 3 o’clock in the morning.
But if that’s really necessary for this suicidal savior to save Dawson at the end of “Seven Pounds,” then what is he doing with her in the final fantasy scene?
Guess he got over the beloved wife he accidentally killed and brooded over for two previous hours. Love’s a bitch and then you die.