Seven Pounds

Seven Pounds is a movie that has one idea, and tries to stretch it into a two-hour length movie and does so unsuccessfully.

From the immediate start the movie poses a question that controls the entire experience of the movie: Why does this man want to commit suicide?
If you are a competent viewer with a brain, you can arrive at the correct conclusion after 30-40 minutes as Will Smith continually speaks to people in need of organs; we, as the audience, receive car-crash and life-debilitating flashbacks; and then Will Smith wraps up any notion of doubt by talking about killer Jelly Fish and signing organ donor papers--and he does all of this about 40 minutes in about a 2 hour movie. This leaves the remainder of the time just pointlessly re-establishing Will Smith's intentions. Everything he does thereafter has already been stated before in the movie. The whole second half is basically a load of redundancy and boringness. Yes, he cleans and fixes some kind of machine because he's an engineer and he wants to do nice things for people. Yes, he gives a poor lady a house because he's abandoning his former life. Yes, he is doing all these things, but we already know that because it was established priorly in a different and perhaps more effective manner.

The movie goes on and on and on, seeming to meander around in pointlessness as we are approaching the ever nearing conclusion which was already solidified in the back of viewer's heads an hour ago. The only thing that film attempts to do in the second half is establish a romantic subplot which nulls viewers to sleep. I would attribute this boringness to a lack of any conflict in the story--but I am not a professional screenwriter--and since the mystery has already been solved, there is nothing else to watch for. As such, the romantic subplot does not provide much of a context in order to improve the plot.

This movie was interesting at the beginning, but once the mystery is solved, there is nothing else there. The IDEA itself is not bad--it's just not fit to be a 2 hour length film. It would work MUCH better as a 20 minute-or-so short film of the like, where they cut out all the redundancies, chop up all the meandering dialog, and give the basic plot in a much more tight execution.

Seven Pounds, as it stands, has a good idea, but its execution cannot support it for a full two hours.