Seven Pounds Ending and Sentimentality Slammed by Critics

With the Oscar and holiday season upon us, it is just about that time for a movie with Oscar hopes and plans to forcefully jerk tears out of us to come out. Seven Pounds is that movie this year, with Will Smith trying to get some Oscar attention and make us cry our eyes out.

The marketing and publicity for Seven Pounds has been deliberately mysterious, with a story shrouded in secrecy and promises of an ending to tie it all together in tear-jerking fashion. However, the ending and the other 99% of Seven Pounds aren't making too many critics cry.

The most people know about Seven Pounds is that Smith plays a grief-stricken IRS agent who decides to change the live of seven random people, seemingly as penance for a terrible act. But things get complicated when Smith falls for a dying woman, played by Rosario Dawson.

Other than that, the rest of Seven Pounds is played in a jumbled fashion. It seems to be one of those movies with a story that would take a half hour to tell straightforward, but is stretched to two hours through flashbacks and a mismatched structure.

The ending of Seven Pounds is therefore supposed to tie everything together. Also, it would presume to explain what exactly the title of Seven Pounds means. Smith and his Pursuit of Happyness director Gabriele Muccino hoped that it would tie in to a moving and sentimental climax to all that brain teasing.

However, very few critics feel that way. A few, like New York Post reviewer Lou Lumenick, even gave away the big secret ending in their ranting about the film. Some even figured out within a half hour what Seven Pounds really refers to, and therefore figured out the ending with 90 more minutes to go.

The majority of critics slam Seven Pounds for excessive sentimentality, especially in the ending, and a story that makes absolutely no sense to them and defies all logic. They also attack Smith for playing an almost Jesus like figure, and for material like a subplot about a CGI jellyfish. There are some particularly savage reviews from the likes of Variety and the New York Times.

Source: associatedcontent.com