Spend Seven (Or, Technically 127) Minutes In Thrilling Heaven With Davin Fincher's Excellent Thriller Seven

Though his most acclaimed movie may be the 2010 masterpiece The Social Network, which is very much a restrained down-to-Earth movie in many respects, David Fincher's 1995 thriller Seven reminds us all that this guy isn't just a cinematic auteur but also someone along the lines of Sam Raimi that loves to freak out his viewers with some truly sadistic imagery and sequences. You can see that in his most recent feature, Gone Girl, which has plenty of over-the-top kills and buckets of blood when the time comes for it. Fincher knows excellent shot composition and thoughtful narratives like the back of his hand but the guy also knows how to do grimy violence for shock value in a tantalizing manner that furthers the man's versatility as a filmmaker.

In Seven, the movie that basically put Fincher on the map as a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on, loads of gruesome deaths and freaky moments are used to help create a murder mystery tale. The title itself plays a major part in said mystery, as there's some kind of crazed murderer going around and slaughtering people who fit each of the Seven Deadly Sins. The first victim is gluttony, for instance, then greed and so one and so forth. Assigned to this case is veteran detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) who gets paired up with a far younger detective by the name of David Mills (Brad Pitt).

These two fulfill the well-known buddy cop/detective duo dynamic of "wise and well-worn partner teaming up with younger audacious rulebreaker partner who's eager to prove himself" to splendid effect. When you've got two actors like Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt around, not to mention a director like David Fincher who's constantly shown himself to be adept at working with any actor, all ya gotta do is let the camera roll and let Freeman and Pitt work their magic. They have some fun moments in their rapport while also filling out actual well-realized characters in their performances instead of just leaning entirely on one-note archetypes.

In terms of their own performance, we all know Morgan Freeman can play a figure overflowing with sage wisdom like few others can though Freeman brings a sense of weariness to this character that makes it evident how long he's been in this job. Brad Pitt, meanwhile, has similar success with his own more cocky character, even if, on a personal note, it was weird to see Pitt playing an explicitly younger character after spending a good chunk of my life watching him fill out roles in recent years where he's playing someone more in the middle-aged range of life (i.e. Moneyball, The Big Short, 12 Years A Slave, etc.)

To my surprise, the screenplay for Seven is not based upon an already existing crime novel but rather is a completely original concept from screenwriter from Andrew Kevin Walker, one that's well-structured and has a lot of fun with keeping both the audience and the characters themselves guessing at what kind of nasty tricks the features mysterious murderer has up their sleeve. Walker knows his way around executing a proper mystery tale, that's for sure, and David Fincher is obviously having a sadistic glee in visually depicting the disturbing acts the two leads encounter, which sometimes seem like the kind of over-the-top and bloody demises that would work as a precursor for the various deaths on Bryan Fuller's Hannibal.

All of that grisly stuff is all in service of the well-constructed story of course, so it doesn't come off as gratuitous or extraneous, though it does feel like Fincher and Walker are both appropriately reveling in the disturbing areas this story can turn to. One such place this story can go is a nail-biter climax wherein the compelling lead dynamic of a wise veteran detective and an eager younger detective that has informed the rest of the movie get utilized as the groundwork for a finale that tests both characters, but one in particular, far more than these typical detective murder mystery do. But that's Seven for ya, willing to push the boundaries and go further all in the name of delivering some shock value and terrifically made cinema in equal measure.