I’m guessing the Gentlemen title is made in jest as these characters are anything but. The main one is a violent drug lord named Mickey. The plot has to do with his efforts to get out of the business.
Except it’s a lot more complicated than that. Confusing would be a better word. The snappy dialogue and quick-cut editing demand your undivided attention in order not to get lost in the steak sauce.
my rating : 3 of 5
2020
Seven Psychopaths isn’t so much a movie about seven psychopaths as it is a movie about a movie about seven psychopaths. That is if merely being a brutal murderer qualifies a person as such. I’d argue that, outside of the pop-based pseudoscience known as psychology, it doesn’t. But that semantic debate is beside the point.
The plot reels you in from the start with two mob-style killers engaging in an interesting dialogue and never really gets boring from there. It never really gets particularly enjoyable neither, let alone as clever as it aims to be. Billy Bickle, a source of comic relief in a movie that would do better without it, is annoying. The dog is adorable.
my rating : 3 of 5
2012
It’s dialogue between a guy in a phone booth and his potential murderer that holds this movie together. The guy; a publicist who deceives people for a living; has a wife and a secret girlfriend whose lives are also on the line. At least that’s what the guy on the line tells him. He also says that if he leaves the booth, he’ll shoot him from one of the windows in one of the buildings hovering above. To show he’s really there, he takes a shot at a toy robot just outside the booth.
It’s a clever and captivating concept. The plot, which seems to run in real time, sticks with it to the end. Almost every scene takes place at the phone booth with a frequent array of shaky zoom shots and split screening for visual stimulation, but the gunman’s motive is weak. He claims to be motivated by morality and doesn’t really demand anything in exchange for his victim’s life, so the mind game he plays starts to get a little redundant after a while.
my rating : 4 of 5
2002
This is a movie a lot of working people can relate to. The main characters, men with white-collar jobs, hate their bosses for good reason. Even Dale, a dental assistant who’s sexually harassed by his hot chick boss, is justified because he wants to remain monogamous to his fiancée. Those constant advances are supposed to be funny, sometimes they are, but the sexist double standard they take advantage of isn’t lost on me.
As far as malice goes, the dentist is by far the least horrible of the three bosses. She is at least attracted to Dale in a positive way. His two best friends, Nick and Kurt, have to put-up with bosses who seem to hate them right back. Sitting in a bar one day, the three goofballs come-up with the idea to kill their bosses. Once that plot point is set, you’re hooked in, waiting to see how everything is going to turn-out in the end.
Too bad the story doesn’t go for real suspense. It’s built upon a simple yet potentially brilliant concept that could’ve worked wonders in a serious movie. As a comedy, one that’s consistently almost funny but never really funny, everything from how horrible the bosses are to how the workers go about planning to kill them is caricatured to unrealistic proportions. The ending you wait an hour and a half for is especially ridiculous.
my rating : 3 of 5
2011