Word: sommerset
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...story's beginning is formulaic. Disillusioned, jaded, semi-legendary homicide detective William Sommerset (Morgan Freeman) has one week (seven days) to go before retirement. During that week he is to break in his replacement, the young hot-shot, David Mills (Brad Pitt). There is tension between the two detectives, just as there is in every other movie that starts off with some variation of this basic theme, where the young, energetic super-cop is paired with the veteran who has lost his energy ("Lethal Weapon," "Report to the Commissioner," "Point Break" and many, many more...
Someone is murdering people in a series patterned after the seven deadly sins (Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy and Wrath). Sommerset and Mills start on the first case, Gluttony, together. They find the most obese man they have ever seen ("Somebody call Guinness," says Mills) dead at his dinner table. He has been forced to eat himself to death. It sounds farfetched. It isn't. Their precinct captain wants them to investigate as a team, but Sommerset quickly pulls the plug. He has had a premonition, and not only does he not want to be involved in the case...
...including our stomachs) the case to which Mills is transferred turns out to be the Greed crime; he and Somerset are sucked into investigating the series. At one point in the course of this horrific journey, Mills turns to Somerset and asks "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Sommerset keeps looking straight ahead and, after a pause, says "No." That's damned right. We have pools of blood, feces, vomit, roaches, decomposition, forced self-mutilation and some of the most brutal tortures you can imagine. Along with some you probably can't (watch out for Sloth and Lust...
...actors playing physically or mentally disabled characters (Daniel Day-Lewis in "My Left Foot" and Tom Hanks in "Forrest Gump"). He will hopefully be nominated again for "Seven," but with his luck someone will release "Rain Man II" at Christmas and again deny him his due. Freeman's Detective Sommerset does not just pay lip service to being burned-out. His spirit is so heavy we can almost feel its weight. He lives in a world filled with ugliness, and when confronted with beauty, in the form of Tracy Mills, he seems ready to weep...
...someone on the shoulder anymore to get their attention. Now you have to hit them with a sledgehammer." Perhaps they have hit us with this visual sledgehammer so that we will reconsider what we regard as innocence and lack of sin, when we forgive greed, gluttony and the rest. Sommerset talks of apathy being regarded as a virtue in the city. The killer wants to awaken society from its apathy and so, maybe, do the film-makers. According to them, virtue may defeat sin but it does not defeat the anger that sin creates in the killer...