Review: Seven Pounds (1/5)

Seven Pounds
(Gabriele Muccino)
Will Smith, Woody Harrelson, Rosario Dawson, Michael Ealy, Barry Pepper.
Running time: 118 minutes. (15A)

Seven Pounds is like a school bully. It wants nothing more than to turn you into a snivelling, weepy-eyed blubber puss. I’d give it my lunch money so as not to have to watch it again. It stars Will Smith as a depressed US Treasury official called Ben Thomas. He begins the film telling a 911 operator he’s going to commit suicide.
We then see him beforehand, investigating the finances of sick people, which involves some very suspect behaviour. He plays good cop, bad cop, engages in strange acts of kindness and falls in love with Rosario Dawson’s Emily, a woman wearing lots of grey pallor make-up and in need of a heart transplant. His best pal needs a bone marrow transplant. Could Woody Harrelson’s blind man need an eye transplant too?
The director Gabriele Muccino, who teamed with Smith for The Pursuit of Happiness, has an engaging style. His movies are neatly constructed and somewhat enigmatic. But this is an insufferable, one-note, minor key, mushy, maudlin melodrama. It’s like listening to Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ only to have someone drop the piano on your head. The plot is designed to keep you guessing and to make you cry as often as possible. Once you’ve stopped guessing and observe its improbable script, cry you will.