Will Smith’s Seven Pounds Sucks

While on Oprah to promote Seven Pounds, Will Smith said that he's decided to make sure that everything he does in his life since turning 40 is done with purpose. Clearly he signed on for Seven Pounds while he was still 39.

Will Smith has become so pretentious in his success. There's no way he read the script for Seven Pounds and thought that the film was at all necessary to complete. Despite it's more than two-hour runtime, the film manages to accomplish absolutely nothing of relevance. Sure, the sentiment is nice, but the logic is non-existent, and in the end Seven Pounds only seeks to further satisfy Smith's desperate Oscar ambitions.

Don't get me wrong, Smith is an exceptional actor. He's shown an almost remarkable amount of growth since his Fresh Prince days, and has become one of the most dependable leading men of contemporary cinema. But sadly for Smith, dependable has become nearly synonymous with predictable, as the actor increasingly relies on the same roles in the same films to sustain his level of box office success. Seven Pounds is The Pursuit of Happyness. The logistics may differ, but the aim is still the same, and so is Smith's onscreen presence.

Seven Pounds isn't a bad film, it's just not the film as advertised. It's not even the film that it thinks it is. While trailers and interviews will have you believe that Seven Pounds is a life-changing (or affirming) tour de force, in reality it's just a predictable waste of time. Perhaps it would be easier to take the film as is, disregarding all of the hype and pretense, if it didn't take itself as seriously as it does. The plot creeps along tediously as if it's satisfying you with every second, offering brief bits of foreshadowing via flashbacks (a la I Am Legend), before abruptly climaxing all over the place, and inevitably only getting itself off. In that regard, it's like paying to watch someone masturbate…for hours.

As for anyone looking to see Will Smith "change his life in 7 seconds," trust me, it's hardly worth wasting your own for two hours. If you're paying attention from the beginning, the film's twist ending is obvious within the first 30 minutes, and even if you haven't figured it out by the time it happens, you'll retroactively realize you were giving the film too much credit, and the ending is as predictable as you told yourself it couldn't be.

Rosario Dawson turns in a very strong performance, and further demonstrates why she's one of the most underrated actresses of the moment. She's too good for this film. Hell, even the dog that accompanies her ailing character is too good for this mess. Dawson's career has barely recovered from the last time she co-starred with Smith in Men in Black II, and I'm not sure she'll survive round two.

I knew I should have saved $7.50 for Benjamin Button.