Seven Pounds - 1 smile

Seven Pounds – 1 smile

“Seven Pounds,” an overly long manipulative tearjerker, is a depressing drama about a suicidal widower wracked with guilt over killing his wife in a car accident in which he was focused on his cell phone instead of the road. To redeem himself, Ben Thomas (Will Smith), posing as an IRS agent, decides to perform random acts of kindness by helping seven strangers. And it is important to Ben that these people be worthy of his largess. To make a long story longer, an unexpected romance develops between him and Emily (Rosario Dawson), a beautiful, terminal heart patient. Among other charity cases are Ezra (Woody Harrelson), a blind telemarketer; Connie (Elphidia Camillo), a battered woman too afraid of her violent boyfriend to leave him; Nicholas, a young child in need of a bone marrow transplant; and Holly, a social worker with cirrhosis of the liver.

A major problem is director Gabriele Muccino’s tediously slow pacing; it takes forever to get to the point of the whole movie. And it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to figure out what’s happening after the first 30 minutes. None of Ben’s actions seem believable once you’ve figured out what he’s going to do although Will Smith has a lot of on screen charisma. No one really wants to spend two hours watching him brood and be depressed. In addition, most of the supporting actors are wasted except Dawson. She is able to hold her own with Smith, but you have to wonder if her character really would risk making love given the extreme weakness of her heart. And what’s with the title, ‘seven pounds’? Seven pounds of what? “Seven Pounds” is trying to be profound, but it’s one of the most awful movies I’ve seen this year. 12/19/08