Review of Seven Pounds (2008) by Harry W — 05 Feb 2014

I wasn't sure what to expect from Seven Pounds, but I was told that Will Smith gave a great dramatic performance so I figured I shouldn't miss it.

Seven Pounds is an example of how successful a film can be simply on how many viewers are willing to pay to see someone onscreen. In this case, it's Will Smith because the poster, trailer and name of the film Seven Pounds give no real insight into what the film is really about. It's all a mystery. And Seven Pounds is not a film that I could predict anything out of, because within the intro viewers bear witness to the darker side of Will Smith which is very rarely seen as he is more often a hero of some form or another. But in Seven Pounds the first thing he shows is a relentless aggression and almost passion for chastising a person for being blind. It's an intense emotional sight, and not at all what I expected from Seven Pounds, because while I didn't know what to expect I would never have predicted that America's prince Will Smith would be in the role of a person mocking a blind man. Seven Pounds works as a film which shows off the acting talents of Will Smith you may not have seen before, and that way it does immediately succeed in terms of casting.

But the mystery of Seven Pounds soon wears thin because the questions viewers ask don't get answered and then the film stops asking questions. It simply descends into being an ambiguously directed melodramatic story which soon turns into a romantic drama that is unpredictable in a no longer good way. It doesn't characterise its protagonist Tim Thomas at all because it tells nothing about him except the slight hint that he has some kind of trouble to him. And while the story deals with some hard hitting dramatic terriroty, it crams it into the film's climax and overloads the dramatic impact after such an extensive period of melodrama which renders it tonally inconsistent. And while the cinematography is nice and the musical score benefits the drama, the drama is really scattershot with the inconsistent pacing and so the whole experience isn't ever as good as it could have been.

Seven Pounds is an ambitious drama at best, and some of its dramatics are powerful. But really it is misguided as a story and doesn't receive enough direction from Gabriele Muccino who fails to live up to the success of his previous collaboration with Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happiness.

Luckily Seven Pounds benefits from a great cast.

Will Smith gives an incredibly powerful lead performance in Seven Pounds. Though the unveiling of the mysterious story in Seven Pounds isn't too effective, his performance is because he ensures that there is constantly a dramatic movement in the story due to his effortful performance in which he displays a true tenacity over the mysterious and grim atmosphere of the story. His facial expressions use a little less tension than many of his other films, and through that minor change to his physicality it is proved that he can change the atmosphere of the story from intensely energetic to depressing through such a simple change, and from there his twice Academy Award nominated dramatic acting skills take over and show off just what he can do. And what he does is give a successful performance which cranks up the effect of Seven Pounds and makes Tim Thomas a character easy to care about or connect to. Will Smith characterises Tim Thomas more than writer Grant Nieporte could, and so he is a genial lead.

Rosario Dawson gives one of the best performances of her career in Seven Pounds, because her supporting performance shows that she shares a superior chemistry with Will Smith to the one they shared in the low quality Men in Black II and she also proves how simply she can construe her true talents as an actress. Her acting talent is largely rooted in her eyes, because where she looks and how she looks at it defines her mood and the height of her emotional subtext in sequences. She has a real power at creating a strong facial expression when the scene calls upon her to do kit, and luckjily her performance never descends into the melodramatic territory that much of the rest of the film ends up doing.

Barry Pepper and Woody Harrelson provide strong presences and good supporting roles key to the story in their own little way as well in Seven Pounds.

So Seven Pounds is a well acted and unpredictable drama, but it doesn't seem any more predictable to the director who fails to give it any sort of consistency whatsoever.