See It or Skip It: Seven Pounds

Seven Pounds should be re-titled "Seven Pounds of Cheese."

Rotting, stinky cheese.

Will Smith’s latest vehicle, which is too irritatingly cryptic to be explained in a few lines here, earns the dubious honor of not only being one of the worst films of 2008, following closely on the heels of the unwatchable Hounddog, it is also the least comprehensible movie we can call to mind. It makes Memento look as linear as an episode of Hannah Montana.

Truncated, meandering and excruciatingly, punishingly vague, the film is filled with overwrought, badly delivered performances across the board. Will Smith strains and struts, obviously hoping to reclaim his Ali glory, but looking more like he’s in the throes of passing a kidney stone, leaving his love interest, Rosario Dawson, to rely solely on her charm and beauty. Woody Harrelson’s inclusion in the story, if we can call it that, is extraneous at best and we wonder if he was only tossed in as a blind pianist because he lost a bet somewhere along the way.

Sadly, the performance quality is nothing compared to Grant Nieporte’s script, which is the worst in recent memory. There were moments when we wondered if the pages had been accidently shuffled by an intern before copying and no one caught the mistake on their way to the set. Unfortunately, we fear that wasn’t the case. Nieporte’s previous credits were two episodes of Eight Simple Rules... and one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Perhaps sitcom is more his genre since this attempted leap to “drama” is a colossal disaster. 

Director Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) has constructed a film which basks in its own supposed brilliance but is impossible to connect with, either emotionally or intellectually. He relies heavily on a ferociously grating score, a script even he admits he couldn’t decipher until the last five pages, bouncy, tiresome hand-held camera work and a star who needed to be significantly reigned in.

When the only other film that was worse this year featured the rape of an 11-year-old, what else can we say but: SKIP IT!!!!

In fact, run screaming in the opposite direction. You can thank us later.