SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS (R) If you're looking for a viable candidate for best movie cast this year, look no further than Martin McDonagh's latest, Seven Psychopaths. Colin Farrell plays an Irish expat living in Hollywood named Marty who's working on a screenplay called Seven Psychopaths. There's a big problem however: Marty can't get past the logline. How Marty gets out of his creative funk by hanging out with his goofy dog-napping best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) and observing a motley crew of misfits, depressed losers and dangerous killers who crowd into his world, makes for the comedic meat of the movie. Shots are fired, heads explode, and dogs get snatched.

McDonagh, partly channeling numerous gods of cinematic violence and mayhem such as Scorsese and Tarantino (the two obvious nods), is clearly having a blast working with so many expert scene-stealers (Christopher Walken, Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Waits) giving it their all. It's reckless to think that McDonagh is just an imitative hack. Although Seven Psychopaths seems like a throwback to the sort of post-Tarantino comedy crime picture that inundated movie screens and video store shelves in the mid-to-late 1990s, McDonagh honed his own distinctive voice at that same time with the plays The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. The plays are indebted to Tarantino, particularly in the way McDonagh's characters talk and how humor and cruelty are entwined, but there's a psychological weight on offer in McDonagh's work that Tarantino doesn't seem interested in pursuing. He also shares with Tarantino a love of meta-fictional storytelling, undermining the clichés of a genre with self-aware winks to the audience while embracing the impulsive need for seeing men go furiously kill-crazy.

In 2008, McDonagh made the leap to making feature films with In Bruges, starring Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hitmen suffering existential meltdowns in the European city while on an assignment. Seven Psychopaths is a worthy follow-up, although the narrative rabbit hole McDonagh gleefully plunges us down is more conceptually daring and freewheeling. It doesn't hold together as well as the earlier movie, but there's a real gonzo energy in the self-reflexive detours Seven Psychopaths takes, that it ultimately doesn't matter. McDonagh may only be jazzing about, but there's no shame in that when you're a virtuoso of the well executed f-bomb and your sly observations about cinema and life are sharper than any steely stiletto to the ribs.