I am not going to see Will Smith’s new movie. I might work in Milk before I fly out. Maybe not.
So I was poking around looking for a spoiler as to Seven Pounds. Can’t find it nowhere.
Am I wrong to even ask?
I don’t understand why anyone would want that. Obviously the mystery is the whole point of the movie, and just because you can’t see it now you want it spoiled? How’s about just keeping it in mind for next time you’re in the states or see a bootleg for sale and watch it for the first time and actually get to enjoy it.
Most ironic username/comment combination?
Can we post baseless speculation? My theory from watching the preview is that Will Smith feels/was responsible for some sort of accident and he is trying to make it up to the seven relatives.
I looked up the movie on Wikipedia/IMDB/its official website. They say he plays an IRS agent who is depressed over the death of his wife and feels guilty about something in the past. His plan is to commit suicide, but first he’ll help seven different people. His plan gets complicated when he falls in love with a woman who has heart problems.
My complete and random guess is that [spoiler]he plans to kill himself and then donate his organs to people who are sick. Maybe somehow he found out his tissue type and then looked it up on the transplant waiting lists or something. “Seven pounds” = seven pounds of flesh = atone for past sins by giving up your organs to needy people.
So the complication is that he meets that woman with heart problems and falls in love with her. So he really wants her to get a new heart, but obviously if he kills himself and she gets the heart then he won’t be around to be with her anymore.[/spoiler]
Seems like a reasonable question to me. There’s lots of movies where the commercial suggests there’s some sort of twist, and leaves me moderately curious what the twist is, but not so much I want to sit through a whole movie to find out.
I don’t have any spoilers for Seven Pounds, though.
Thank you alj,
Waenara is basically right. I didn’t particularly hate this movie as some of the critics did (though I didn’t particularly like it, either.) Not having known anything about it going in, I was enthralled by the first half where you have no idea what Will Smith is up to. Every scene gives a tiny insight into his motives, but raises more questions about what’s actually going on. It reminded me somewhat of Michael Clayton in terms of giving the audience just enough information to keep them glued to the screen in anticipation. But unlike Michael Clayton, it isn’t able to keep that up all the way through.
But then when it becomes clear, it takes far too long to get to the resolution, and there’s one of those unnecessary third-act explain-it-to-the-brain-dead-members-of-the-audience scenes. In particular, the romance with Rosario Dawson took too much away from Ben’s stories regarding the other characters, which were equally compelling even though they didn’t involve hot sex.
The movie first tries to be a story about a solitary Hero on a mission for redemption, but then it’s also about an unexpected love that develops between two people. It’s extremely difficult to reconcile the two and still have a satisfying journey; trying to be grander than it actually was is probably the movie’s main failing.
So, which is it? A psychological semi-noir thriller about a guy with a mysterious agenda who may not be who he says he is? Or a love story between a heartbroken man with a tragic past and a lonely woman who is dying? It can’t be both, yet it is.
I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis. I found the movie to be mildly underwhelming and the “mystery” wasn’t complex enough or obscured enough to carry my interest in the story all the way through. That said, Will Smith was good in it, as was Dawson. I would have preferred if they’d have spent more time indulging in Smith’s evaluation of the 7 strangers and the hits and misses along the way instead of developing the predictable and unsatisfying love story. I get what they were trying to do with the love story and the conflict it created, but without a big surprise ending or deeper sense of moral conflict it was essentially pointless.