Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The film opens in late 1881, when the infamous James Gang, led by outlaw brothers Jesse (played by Brad Pitt) and Frank (Sam Shepard) is finally on the decline after terrorizing Missouri and other parts of the West for many years. They pull off one final train robbery at Blue Cut, and then head their separate ways. Among the gang members at the time were Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell) and his kid brother Robert (Casey Affleck), who, at 19, is desperately trying to earn Jesse’s respect and a more active role in heists. Robert has idolized Jesse since he was a kid, and wants to be deemed worthy by the infamous killer.

After the gang splits up, Jesse takes Bob along with him on various errands, delegating menial tasks for the kid to perform. At first, Jesse liked having someone openly idolize him like Bob did, but after a while, it gets on his nerves and he sends Bob off while he goes somewhere else. Jesse wants to try recruiting more gang members for new jobs, so he busies himself with that, while Bob gets involved in a major dispute between two former gang members, Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider) and Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner). It’s around this time that Dick confides to Bob that he and another former James Gang member, Jim Cummins, are planning to capture Jesse for the major bounty on the outlaw’s head. Though Dick and Jim don’t succeed, this plants the assassination seed in Bob’s head.

From there, the film shows the increasingly strained relationship between Jesse James and the Ford brothers. Jesse’s behavior becomes more erratic and paranoid than ever, as he continually hears about different plots to assassinate him. Meanwhile, Charley and Bob look for the perfect opportunity to take out Jesse, but fail to find it because Jesse suspects even those closest to him and is never without his guns. Finally, on April 3, 1882, things come to a head. Due to the confluence of several different events, Jesse realizes his time is up. He drops his gun belt in plain sight, turns his back on the armed Ford brothers, and is shot in the head by Robert.

For some weeks after the shooting, Bob and Charley enjoy great fame and notoriety. They even turn the assassination into a one-act play, starring themselves, and earn a bunch of money from the effort. But then public opinion starts to turn, and people begin to lionize Jesse in death while vilifying Bob for his cowardly assassination. Finally, a man named Edward O’Kelly (Michael Copeman) hunts Bob down in the saloon he runs and murders him on June 8, 1892, a crime for which O’Kelly would be pardoned.

My Reaction: I really wanted to like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. After all, it’s about Wild West outlaws and features a very good cast. But unfortunately, the execution (pardon the pun) was way off in my opinion, leaving viewers with a long, drawn-out, confusing narrative in which nothing much happens.

First of all, I wasn’t familiar with any of the outlaws besides Jesse, and since he and Robert Ford were the only recognizable characters in the film, I had a lot of trouble keeping everyone else straight and understanding their relationships to Jesse and to each other. Is it my job as a viewer to note everyone’s name and role, or is it the director’s job to make the main characters memorable enough for the average viewer to keep straight? I think the onus falls on the director, and Andrew Dominik failed miserably in this respect. Wood Hite? Dick Liddil? Ed Miller? Tim James? Mary James? Martha Bolton? Sarah Hite? I couldn’t pick any of them out of a lineup. As a result, the only interesting parts for me were when Jesse and Bob were on screen together, which actually wasn’t that often in this 160-minute movie.

Second, there was very little tension throughout the film. I think some of the scenes, like when Jesse and Bob were sleeping in the same room because Jesse suspected Bob, were supposed to be tense, but failed to achieve the desired effect. Why? Because even if we don’t know anything about history, the title of the film tells us that Bob succeeds in killing Jesse. In other words, Bob’s life was never really in danger, not from the viewer’s perspective anyway. So those scenes that showed Jesse acting maniacal, holding a knife to Bob’s throat, not letting him get up to go to the bathroom, etc. just seemed heavy-handed and melodramatic instead of tension-filled.

There were other problems with the film, including the overly long running time, but the two I listed above were the big ones that really prevented me from enjoying the piece.

Overall, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a rather dull treatment of what should have been a very interesting story. Good performances by Pitt and Affleck couldn’t save this film from being a mostly agonizing experience. I give it 1 star out of 5.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Seven Pounds opens with Ben Thomas (played by Will Smith) calling 911 from his motel room. Send an ambulance, he says. There’s been a suicide. When the operator asks who the victim is, Ben responds that he is — which of course leads to the requisite flashbacks to show the audience just how Ben came to that point.

We next see Ben visiting various folks in his capacity as an IRS agent. Instead of wanting to audit them, however, he seems more interested in the hardships they’re facing in their lives and claims that he can help them. But first he has to “make sure” that they’re truly nice, generous folks who are actually worth being saved. Among the candidates are Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind call center employee who maintains his cool even when Ben deliberately baits him, and Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson), a greeting card printer who suffers from a heart condition and whose wait for a donor is lengthened by her rare blood type.

As Ben interacts with these people, the audience senses that something’s wrong with him, but the filmmakers decided to withhold this information to make the whole thing a “mystery”. Does he suffer from a terminal illness? Does he have a God complex? Is he looking to redeem himself for some past wrong? We don’t find out until the very end.

Once we make it back to the opening scene of the 911 call, we then follow Ben as he immerses himself in a bathtub filled with ice water — and a single jellyfish. He lets the jellyfish sting him, and the poison quickly does its job. We later learn that Ben’s organs end up benefiting seven different people, his way of atoning for the seven lives he took when he caused an accident because he was driving while texting.

My Reaction: Wow, what a long, tedious, boring movie Seven Pounds was! I usually expect great things from Will Smith, but have been severely disappointed in his last three offerings (Pursuit of Happyness, Hancock, and now this catastrophe). There were so many reasons why this film didn’t work, but the biggest one was the fact that the writers didn’t give the audience any reason to sympathize/empathize with Smith’s character. Because I didn’t know what the hell he was doing, I didn’t really care what he was up to.

This was obviously a calculated risk on the filmmakers’ part. They probably thought they could create suspense and tension, and then a big shock at the end when they finally revealed the big secret. I guess that could work in some cases, but it certainly doesn’t here. We needed to know what was going on with this character so we could root for him along the way. Instead, he came off like a creepy stalker freak most of the time, and I never once became interested in what he was doing.

And how about that suicide scene? I might have dozed off and missed the explanation (if there was one), but why in god’s name did he have to commit suicide via a freakin’ jellyfish? Was there a point to that? Or was that simply a plot device to make viewers say, “Wow, how original!”. More like, how ridiculous.

Overall, I thought Seven Pounds was one of the weakest films I’ve seen in a long time. I didn’t find any aspect of it to be entertaining or worthwhile, not the acting, not the message, nothing…. I give it 1 star out of 5.