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83A movie that plays better if you know nothing about it going in.
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Now, with Seven Pounds, the transformation of Will Smith is complete: Gone is any trace of love-me impishness, replaced by one of the sourest pusses Hollywood has seen since Joaquin Phoenix got his Screen Actors Guild card.
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75Some people will find it emotionally manipulative. Some people like to be emotionally manipulated. I do, when it's done well.
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75A spiritual successor to "The Pursuit of Happyness," but darker and more oblique.
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75Gripping but gap-filled Seven Pounds will have half your brain asking "How could this be?" and the other half saying, "Shut up and go along for the ride!" Listen to the latter voice.
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63While it doesn't break any new ground or provide any revelations, Seven Pounds is unabashedly emotional and cautiously hopeful. It's the feel-good movie for these feel-bad times.
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63Seven Pounds works better the more the viewer feels and the less he/she thinks. On an emotional level, one could decree that the movie is satisfying. On an intellectual level, it's disappointingly shallow.
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60The film's Italian director does achieve in his second American outing a pleasing blend of Hollywood professional sheen and European sensitivity to character details and nuances.
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60Seven Pounds is the very definition of a 'noble failure.'
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60This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.
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60The movie is pretty unabashed about the all-but-corny sentiment: Each of us has something to give.
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58It's a con job that feels like a precisely attenuated work of art, elegantly weaving flashbacks and ellipses into the story in an effort to conceal how shamelessly manipulative it is in the end. And as always, Smith comes out a winner.
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50As written, Seven Pounds would have always been a melancholy experience, but a lighter touch would have helped to keep you from noticing the implausibility of its plot.
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50Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part "The Giving Tree" and both parts marinated in melancholy.
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50I'd like to make a 911 call myself: Lord, please stop this increasingly fine actor (Smith) from climbing onto another cross.
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50Dawson is lovely to watch, and when Smith isn't furrowing his brow and looking concerned, he's not so bad himself.
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50There's a head-pounding, gob-smacking literalness to this flick, extending from the title right through to the recurring imagery.
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50The movie gets just enough right that the things it doesn't get right (beyond its overdependence on a not-so-surprising story puzzle) smack you cold in the face.
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42Seven Pounds, coming after "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "I Am Legend," seems like the third in a trilogy of inspirational bummers.
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40Saintliness is a heavy burden to carry, and Smith can't help but buckle a bit. He's always interesting to watch, but crafting a real person out of his cardboard character proves an impossible task.
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40A collage of strong scenes, dull bits, good filmmaking and a dissatisfying emotional payoff. A laudable attempt to tackle heavyweight subject-matter that ends up just being heavy weather.
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38Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.
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38Preposterous romantic melodrama, which uses a fractured narrative to cloud an absurd plot that would probably be laughed off the screen if it were presented in a straightforward manner.
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30Contrived hunk of feel-good.
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25An insult to the intelligence of most moviegoers.
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25The whole narrative is too hollow and rickety as well as gimmicky for Muccino to breathe much life into it.
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25An unintentionally ludicrous drama of repentance.
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20The rest of Seven Pounds feels like a half-hour "Twilight Zone" script that has been pressed onto a gob of Silly Putty and stretched to the sinking point.
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20An endlessly sentimental fable about sacrifice and redemption that aims only at the heart at the expense of the head. Intricately constructed so as to infuriate anyone predominantly guided by rationality and intellect.
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10Overall Seven Pounds is too heavy-handed and maudlin to be comprehensible, let alone moving. The real shocker is that not even Smith can rescue it.
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10Mr. Smith's latest film is about nothing less than life and death, sin and atonement, and it takes the soggy cake for multiple layers of sentimentality topped by indigestible grandiosity.
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Dispiritingly obvious and phony from top to bottom.
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0The most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.