VILE BODIES

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

They bicker and bond--a wise, weary detective (Morgan Freeman) in his last week before retirement and an eager kid (Brad Pitt) fresh from the country and ready to kick some big-city butt. Police partnerships don't come any lower concept than this. On the other hand, the serial killer they are pursuing, a creepy, brainy religious fanatic played by Kevin Spacey, is a high-concept kind of guy: he's trying to commit seven murders in seven days, each of them supposed to illustrate one of the seven deadly sins in some preposterously stomach-churning way.

Luckily, the setting for Seven (the title is the only understated thing about the picture) is an anonymous metropolis where it rains all the time and no one seems to have paid his light bill. The murk hides some (but not all) of the grisly details. Murk is also the auteurial hallmark of director David Fincher (Alien 3). Aiming to be a modern-day Bosch, he ends up doing MTV bosh.

His pretenses are curiously well matched to those of first-time screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, whose range of literary allusions runs from Dante to Chaucer but whose gift for low-genre necessities--suspense, jeopardy, snappy dialogue--is nonexistent. His big idea is that man is vile and that cities are catch basins for the worst of our fallen breed. He must be very young.

The actors, among them Gwyneth Paltrow as the young cop's wife (whom we immediately perceive as good, and therefore doomed), do their best to ground this twaddle in recognizable behavior. But it is very tiresome peering through the gloom trying to catch a glimpse of something interesting, then having to avert one's eyes when it turns out to be just another brutally tormented body.

--R.S.