Seven Pounds (2008)

Having achieved box office star status in the 90s, Will Smith has been able to bounce back and forth between comedies, dramas and everything in between. Just when you think he’s settled into one genre, he changes it up again. While he’s still very much a box office draw, his eclectic choices have come back to bite him as of late and it does so here. It’s really no fault of his own, but Seven Pounds is a muddled mess of a film that fails to live up to its pre-release hype.

Ben Thomas (Will Smith) seems like an extraordinary man; a true Good Samaritan. Over the period of a year he has offered to help people in need by donating a part of his liver, part of his lung, a kidney and bone marrow to people facing medical uncertainties. He searches for people to help and even begins to fall in love with a woman he is lending a hand to (Rosario Dawson). But Ben also has a dark side. He suffers severe mood swings and stares longingly at his pet jellyfish.

Something dark is driving this man to be so generous and that is what we’re left to try to figure out until the very end of this film. I’m not going to spoil the big revelation for you, which, unfortunately, severely limits what I can write about this film here. All I can say is that I was left incredibly disappointed, frustrated and confused.

Here’s what I can tell you- Seven Pounds wraps up its secrets so tightly that, when it all starts to unravel before your eyes, you can barely keep up. For starters, ‘Ben’ is actually Tim Thomas, impersonating his brother in order to facilitate his obsession with helping people. His obsession stems from something tragic in Tim’s life that provides a connection to the film’s title. It’s not the clear-cut reference I was thinking, so you better bone up on your allusions if you hope to figure it out.

Once this film comes to an end and you have a minute to breathe and think, the questions start coming. Why did it take his brother so long to figure out Tim was impersonating him? The film’s explanation aside, why else does Tim push himself so manically hard towards helping people? These are just a few of the ideas that popped up in my mind within minutes of the end credits.

Will Smith does a pretty good job of portraying a desperate and driven man. He hits a number of emotions in very believable ways. The trouble is that the character is just too all over the place to be plausible. Tim Thomas is borderline self-destructive and his obsession with helping others borders on being a creepy infatuation more than nobility. While it’s nice to see someone doing good things, it’s unsettling to see him go to such great, and sometimes illegal, lengths to meet his ends. These aren’t random acts of kindness, which makes his actions seem like he’s going overboard.

I do appreciate a good mystery but Seven Pounds plays it a little too close to the vest for too long. When the cards are finally laid down, you don’t have enough time to rethink everything you’ve seen to fit it into the proper perspective and chronology as the film sprints to a conclusion. Will Smith does the best that he can, which is pretty darn good, but there are too many logical and filmmaking flaws for the allure of the Fresh Prince to cover up.

RATING: 2 out of 5

Battlefield Earth (2000)

This film typically gets brought up when there is discussion of the worst movies ever made. The granddaddy of them all is Plan 9 From Outer Space, but Battlefield Earth always gets an honorable (or dishonorable?) mention. It was only a matter of time before I saw this movie, and I found myself with the need for something awful and a 3 for $10 Blockbuster coupon.

To be honest, I was disappointed. Battlefield Earth isn’t nearly as bad as people say it is, although it certainly does suck. At times it really seems like the story was fetched right from the pre-writing phase and turned into a movie. While most of the criticism for the film’s lack of achievement is merited, it seems like most people declaring it one of the all-time worst are really just taking potshots at John Travolta and his merry band of Scientologists using the film to promote their “religion.”

But let’s be clear- Battlefield Earth has nothing to do with Scientology. There may be some parallels and allusions to Scientologist beliefs, but Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote this story purely for fun. Sure, his bias against psychiatry shines through, but Scientologists do not believe that this film is what our future will become.

The most annoying thing about this film is that virtually every single shot is on some kind of angle. This little bit of artistic expression gets old and annoying really fast and by the end of the film (if you make it that far) you still are not comfortable with it. The script also suffers greatly. All the terminology, like breath-gas, shows just how big a hack L. Ron Hubbard was as a writer- this is a cheap, pulp novel story suffering from too much overconfidence and indulgence. Some updating would have helped, but even though it was published in 1980, it seems Hubbard decided to stick with the fantastical junk science of the 1930s.

Essentially, Battlefield Earth is just a poorly-constructed piece of science fiction that isn’t very original and would have otherwise been ignored had it not been for Hubbard’s connection to Scientology. However, there are sparks of creativity, but any potential that may exist in this film is buried so far down it would cost tens of millions of dollars for a studio to try and rewrite, salvage and turn it into something fit for theaters. It’s kind of like those cheesy, lame Sci-Fi Channel original movies, except someone actually thought this would succeed in the theaters.

It’s bad for sure, but not bad enough to be immortalized.

RATING: 0.75 out of 5