Seven Pounds of Nothing

I think Will Smith is usually a very good actor, he mixes charm and presence to create characters that make me want to see him act again. His depth and breadth are wonderful. That is not true in his most recent movie, Seven Pounds.

On Movies.com - one writer said "I was very disappointed by this movie. It was extremely slow and unbelievably depressing. This movie was centered around dying and death. If you have lost someone recently or even in the past few years, please don't see this. I nodded off a few times and when I opened my eyes I could pick up where I had last shut my eyes and I could still follow the movie." That about sums it up.

The story is about a successful engineer who is involved in a tragic accident which kills seven people - his wife and six others - due to his texting while driving. He begins to part himself out - giving part of a lung to his brother, then part of his liver to another and splits his kidneys with another. But then he meets a beautiful woman who has a weak heart - so in a final act of atonement he kills himself to give her a new heart and at the same time to offer his corneas to a character played by Woody Harrelson.

The movie begins with fifteen or twenty minutes of disjointed flashbacks and then meanders through a somnambulant script that I guess was meant to be artistic but whose fundamental premise is false - could a person, even a seemingly successful one like Smith's character - go through this process? Any thinking person has figured out both the plot and the conclusion in the first 20 minutes - one wonders why we then stayed to the inevitable conclusion. For the rest of the movie the script becomes something to be endured - you know where it is going. I should have been cautious when I saw that Harrelson was one of the "supporting" actors. Smith has been in a lot of great roles - some comedies and some dramas. So it was especially annoying to see this wasting his tremendous talent.

I would avoid this movie.