The misdirects and plot hijinks -- as well as the hilarious dialogue -- start with the very first scene, which features Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlbarg as -- what else? -- a pair of on-the-job assassins (McDonagh's favorite kind of working stiff) shooting the bull as they keep their eyes trained for their target. Before they can finish the job, though, a masked man walks up behind them and puts a bullet in each of their respective brains. And with that, we cut from actual psychopaths to a guy who writes about them for a living, screenwriter Marty Faranan (Colin Farrell, reuniting with his In Bruges director). Marty has just sold a screenplay entitled Seven Psychopaths to a big studio, but there's a problem: he's only got a title, not a story. Heck, he doesn't even have seven psychopaths -- he's currently stalled out at number two, a Buddhist assassin who preaches and practices non-violence. You can see why this script is in trouble...

When Marty's not avoiding his screenplay through swigs from a whisky bottle, he's hanging out with ne'er-do-well pal Billy (Sam Rockwell), who is currently making his living by stealing dogs and allowing his accomplice Hans (Christopher Walken) to return them for the reward money. One day, Billy makes the mistake of swiping the beloved Shih Tzu belonging to hotheaded crime boss Charlie Costello (Woody Harrelson) and the gangster responds with an extreme show of force. So Hans, Billy and Marty -- who has gotten mixed up in this beyond-amateur caper as well -- hightail it out of town and seek refuge in the desert, where reality and the movie that Marty's writing continue to bleed over into each other. And that's not the only thing that bleeds; as with In Bruges and McDonagh's stage work (most notably A Behanding in Spokane, which Walken headlined in its Broadway run), Seven Psychopaths is filled with grisly, over-the-top deaths, the best of which is an elaborate graveyard massacre that Billy pitches as the end to Marty's movie. Part Rambo, part Dead Alive, this sequence is a comic orgy of ultraviolence that the movie's actual climax can't equal... although that's obviously part of the point.

I've got no complaints about any of the performances in Seven Psychopaths, as the entire ensemble arrives locked, loaded and ready to play. Harrelson and Walken score many of the biggest laughs, but Rockwell and Farrell are just as great, spitting out McDonagh's sentences like they were bullets. And a special shout-out has to go to Tom Waits, who pops up in an extended cameo as an aged psychopath reflecting back on his serial killer salad days. (Actually, I do have a complaint about the cast; I wish the women in the movie -- including Abbie Cornish as Farrell's long-suffering girlfriend and Olga Kurylenko as Harrelson's moll -- actually got to mix it up with the men instead of being relegated to the sidelines. McDonagh does slip a few pointed comments about his problems writing for women into the movie through his male characters, but admitting it isn't the same thing as doing anything about it.) And for the first half at least, the cleverness of the meta-commentary is invigorating, with the writer/director making the audience participants in his hall-of-mirrors game. But after a certain point, I, for one, found myself wanting something real to hold onto, like the surrogate father/son relationship that drove In Bruges. Seven Psychopaths is so arch and sarcastic, it seems to exist entirely within a set of air quotes. I laughed throughout, but left feeling empty inside.

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