What it’s about: Martin (Farrell) is a screenwriter, struggling with his most recent project, a thriller called Seven Psychopaths. He’s drinking too much, his relationship is on the rocks, and the script isn’t going anywhere. This is of great concern to his friend Billy (Rockwell), a ne’er-do-well type who is involved in a scheme with Hans (Walken) to kidnap dogs for ransom. Without consulting his partner, Billy snatches the beloved dog of Charlie (Harrelson), a violent gangster who starts obsessively pursuing the kidnappers. Martin and Hans are roped into the aftermath as the three of them, together, fend off the threat while trying to hammer out what kind of story Martin wants to tell.

Reflections: Like 8½ and Adaptation before it, this is a film that is, abstractedly, about itself. And that is a fundamentally navel-gazing exercise: not for nothing is the main character named Martin. McDonagh seems to be working through a kind of toxic-masculinity–the aggressive, violent impulses and the fascination with them, alcoholism as a coping mechanism, disconnection in relationships with women, and so on. His self-insert in Farrell is flanked by Rockwell’s id-driven Billy, constantly trying to wrestle control of the movie, and the older and more reflective superego in Hans, to whom Walken brings a kind of authoritative serenity. Meanwhile, Harrelson provides a counterweight: the violent man with a weird sensitivity to Martin’s sensitive man with a streak of violence.

Mixed into this core are a whirl of recognizable faces in strange side stories. Tom Waits (clutching a rabbit) tells a story of being part of a serial-killer-killer couple, with nods to real historical killings (such as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders). The main trio discuss and rework the story of a Vietnamese fighter (Nguyen) taking revenge for America’s actions in the war. The characters reference action film tropes and interrogate quotes from Ghandi or Buddhist philosophy. The allusions and fragmentations are trying to push the inward quality of the film into a larger social context–they’re not always successful, but they are entertaining, weird, and sharply written.

A self-obsessed, very dude-oriented movie is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fair. And I would say it’s easily the weakest of McDonagh’s four films so far, which never quite rises to the hallucinatory heights of the aforementioned similar works. But the cast is great and all giving strong performances. And it’s interesting as a glimpse of a the kind of stories we were telling in a particular moment, as we began, in the early 2010s, wrestling with some of the more toxic aspects of 2000s culture. It’s maybe a little too clever for its own good, but there is still intelligence to it and a kind of shaggy-dog charm that makes it worth watching.