If you do the math, the number of true psychopaths in Seven Psychopaths may not quite add up. Perhaps writer-director Martin McDonagh didn't want to go overboard with the murderous crazies. As it is, he's peopled his whimsically brutal comic thriller with — to name just three — an Amish throat-slasher, a dynamite-packing Buddhist and a serial killer who's fond of white bunny rabbits. That's probably enough.
Then again, the killer sickos are just the gimmick in Seven Psychopaths. This is really a movie about the creative impulse and its tendency to make people nuts, a subject it explores with incessant and sometimes exasperating restlessness.
Colin Farrell plays Marty, a Hollywood screenwriter who's behind on his latest script: He has the title ("Seven Psychopaths") and one or two characters (including the killer Buddhist, though he hasn't yet figured out exactly how a Buddhist goes about killing), but beyond that, he's lost.
His best friend, aimless actor-type Billy Bickle — he's played by Sam Rockwell, and his last name is perhaps an all-too-obvious clue regarding his psychological temperament — begs Marty to let him co-write the screenplay, going so far as to take out a "calling all psychopaths" newspaper ad without his buddy's consent.
Billy is extremely loyal to his friends: He believes, rightly, that Marty has a drinking problem and tries to get him off the sauce. He uses up other portions of his generally empty days helping another pal, Hans (Christopher Walken), kidnap dogs and return them to their owners shortly thereafter; Hans accepts, with faux reluctance, whatever reward money is offered, and then uses it for his wife's cancer treatments, so his heart is in the right place.
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Charlie (Woody Harrelson) turns out to bе the kind of guy who's willing to do anything to get his pet back.