In the beginning is the emergency call, and the caller wants to report a suicide. Whose? asks the 911 operator. Mine, says the man.

And so begins the story of Seven Pounds, a strange, swooning mystery about love, loss, redemption and the taxman. They say there are two things in life that you can’t escape from – death and taxes. In this movie, these two terrors seem to have found union in Will Smith’s a.k.a Ben Thomas, a taxman who behaves as if he has come to sit in judgement of those he audits.

He acts beyond the already formidable powers vested in him by the IRS, prying into and holding the lives of others in his hands. What kind of IRS man is this? Who the hell is Ben Thomas? This is the mystery as the core of Seven Pounds. The story immerses us in the puzzle of the IRS agent with the strange audit.

There are seven people in Ben’s list, hence the title of the movie, and he evaluates all of them in an unconventional manner – by snooping about, observing from afar, and talking with people who know them.

Slowly, it emerges that Ben is a man scarred by guilt and personal loss, and that he wants to fill the emptiness of his life and to redeem his life by making other people’s lives better. But first, he wants to know if they are worthy of a helping hand.

I’m not going to elaborate more on the story, you just have to watch it yourself =p

It’s all terribly sappy, not to mention controversial, but resistance is futile. lalala~