TheRetroCritic

Here's a movie the trailers and posters really didn't help. Quite the opposite, in fact. The trailer passing the film off as some kind of Farrelly Brothers-style farce mostly involving Sam Rockwell laughing his ass off and the posters misrepresenting the psychopaths in question and giving us one of the worst taglines you'll ever hear: "They Won't Take Any Shih Tzu" Urgh... The film itself is actually closer to something like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang : a clever, sharply written, funny little dark comedy with an almost poetic look at its seemingly cartoonish characters. Colin Farrell is a depressed alcoholic writer trying to write a script for a film incidentally called "Seven Psychopaths", but he's stuck and needs to find several more psychos before he can finish it. His dog-kidnapping friend, played by a scene-stealing Sam Rockwell, is very keen to help, though, by ANY means necessary. By stealing a nutty Woody Harrelson's dog, this begin

Some films sound so good they shouldn't even exist. Shame it's a comedy, for a second there I thought this was gonna be dead serious. And therefore hilarious. Sadly, being built as a joke it might end up feeling a little too self-aware. Fuck it, I'm seeing it.

You'd think with a film called Cowboys & Aliens there'd be very little room to mess things up. I mean, how much more straight-forward can you get? Just get some cowboys, a bunch of aliens...voila! And yet Cowboys & Aliens doesn't quite get there... Now don't get me wrong: it's a decent film and I really enjoyed it. But alas it falls just short, like all the other summer blockbusters we were treated to this year, of being actually awesome. Which is pretty frustrating as, much like Super 8 and Horrible Bosses , they had the material and everything served up to them on a plate. All they had to do was not spill anything! Here's the thing, it's really quite simple: if you're going for something purely retro like an 80's Spielberg flick or a cowboy sci-fi in the style of Westworld it's your DUTY as a filmmaker to leave the CGI out of it as much as you can. Yes stop-motion monsters can look animated but so does CGI and at the very least