Will Smith. Seven Pounds. A disjointed narrative making the viewer work to pull the pieces together. Mysterious vagueness about plots.
What's not to like?
Er, the movie actually.
Will Smith is Tim Thomas, responsible for pissing around with his Blackberry when he's supposed to be concentrating on his driving, such that he causes a fatal car crash taking the lives of his fiancee and six strangers.
To atone for this he decides to pay seven pounds of flesh (the Jew Shylock in the Merchant of Venice you may recall wanted his pound of flesh as compensation for a non-repaid loan - here Tim Thomas offers up seven pounds of his own flesh as compensation for causing seven deaths).
His way of achieving this is to impersonate his IRS employed brother, Ben, to find suitable "good" candidates for each pound of flesh (rejecting anyone he considers not to be good) and then to kill himself (with a jellyfish - yeah, don't ask), bequeathing his bits and pieces (his eyes to Woody Harrelson, his heart to Rosario Dawson, his house to someone else, bone marrow here, and his penis to John Wayne Bobbitt).
Presented as a straightforward narrative this would bore the tits off anyone (and presumably allow those same tits to be donated to Katie Price) - presumably the director noticed that and decided upon a more fractured narrative structure (we start with the jellywish suicide, then flashback to the car crash, then jump around a bit) to raise a bit of interest.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
The point of the film appears to be to try to make you cry. After all, everyone loves Will Smith so him committing suicide to better the lives of seven other people including his brother, oh boo hoo, pass the hankies....yyyaaaawwwwnnnn. From the very start you're going - ok, he's going to commit suicide, maybe we'll have a twist where he realises that's not the way to do things, that's no way out, let's have his life flash before his eyes (hey, the rest of the movie) and have him decide to not go through with it after all - he can go more good alive, over the course of years he could help hundreds or thousands of people, not just seven....and then, yeah, he kills himself.
Way to glamourise and justify suicide, Will.
What message does this leave? It's ok to kill yourself as long as you donate your organs afterwards. Genius.
Hancock was awful, I Am Legend was a reasonable film which did not do proper justice to its source material, has Will begun to lose it?
Craig Johnson