Spoiler Whiners Beware: Just to be fair about things, N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith is calling Seven Pounds the third-best movie of ’08, or at least his choice for same. This Gabrielle Muccino-Will Smith film, he says, is “simple but perfect, so classically structured that, except for the modern technology in it, it’s like a redemption fable handed down from the ancients.”

Smith’s critical colleague Lou Lumenick, already concerned with Smith’s growing grandiosity, feels differently. He says — HERE IT COMES, SPOILER-AVERSE! — that Seven Pounds (Columbia, 12.19) “should be more accurately titled Seven Hundred Pounds of Schmaltz…it’s like Pay It Forward with organ transplants” with Smith portraying “a suicidal savior.”

Uh-oh….I can already hear and feel the reader rage. We work very hard at keeping our heads in the sand, the spoiler whiners are saying, and since we believe that story and subject matter are 90% if not 95% of the game and that how the film is made — the undercurrents, the things that are not said but felt, the tone and pace of it, the emphasis choices, the performances, the music, the editing style, etc. — is strictly an esoteric toss-up that no one can finally gauge the quality of one way or the other, we believe it is out right and our duty to hunt down Lumenick on the streets of New York and let him feel our wrath first-hand.