The Last Seven

Reading the synopsis I had quite high hopes for this movie which was rapidly vanishing after the first 15 minutes which consisted of a bloke walking around the deserted streets of London's financial district. The long drawn out fifteen minutes of nothingness may impress someone who has never walked those same central London streets at Dawn on a Sunday morning but it doesn't really work for someone who has. I got the distinct impression the makers were trying to force a point here which went way past its premise of a deserted major City. The obviousness of it had me concerned for the rest of the movie.

Eventually our lone walker meets up with a trio, and they meet up with another trio and from there on in there's a lot of long drawn out scenes with intermittent quick flash editing that was intended to scare or intrigue. Im not really sure which but it didn't work.

While I have no doubt most of the seven cast have decent acting abilities, their performances were wooden. Mind you its not as if they had anything meaty to really bounce off so those performances were really down to the directors vision. You cant just put some people in front of a camera, give them some lines and hope for magic, particularly with a movie like this which should provoke the audiences senses. Then again a number of lines in the script are quite appalling, as if they were written by a secondary school drama club. But surely the director must have known those lines were just plain bad and could have done something about them.

For me the movie just plodded along until it came to a point where I was jeering for it to end. I had twigged on quite early their particular circumstance but how it lead to that I didn't know until the very end, so I do give the makers some points for that. In general though it was a rather garbled affair. Yes, it has a sense of continuity but it wasn't glued together very well. Its a movie that may very well have looked just smashing on paper, but hasn't translated so well to the screen.

As indie movies go it is by no means the worst, far from it. Its shot quite well, does have some atmosphere, and can keep you interested. If you haven't seen something in this genre before it may well keep you very interested. But I've seen a lot of these psychological horrors flicks and this one falls short of the mark. Compared to another one I reviewed 'The Broken' now there's a movie that really gets to you on a psychological level. One of the death scenes in that movie still makes me feel uncomfortable a year after watching it. There no gore, its just incredibly moving? or disturbing? I cant really describe what it is. If The Broken cant scare you nothing will.

I cant recommend the movie and I cant not recommend it. As I said, if you haven't seen this type of flick before you may very well enjoy it.

Film tastes vary greatly, I am aware of this. Films that I love have been described to me as "boring" many times over the years. 'Rushmore' , 'The chaser', 'Halloween', all apparently "too slow", or I'm told that "noyhing happens". Well THIS is a movie where absolutely nothing happens for the entirety of it's excruciating running time (anything between 85 mins and a couple of months, depending on how you quantify time). I really have never been so bored in my life, it's as if Uwe Boll found a discarded script by Terence Malick and didn't really get it. Flashbacks featuring Danny Dyer crop up to piece together the supposed plot and it's final twist, and in the hope that all would be revealed and I could switch this piece of garbage off, I welcomed every scene that Dyer appeared in. And I never, ever thought I'd say that. It was not very good.

I actually thought the opening scenes were brilliant and fascinating to watch, albeit he was wandering streets around Bank which are deserted for much of any weekend, but enough to reel you in & put yourself in the position, particularly on Tower Bridge.

But the film then achieves a feat, surely never done before but going rapidly downhill the moment other characters & words are introduced into the plot.

It never really goes anywhere after that, the opening 50 minutes felt more like the opening episode of The Last Train, Survivor, or a relatively low budget TV mini series, when you realise there's only 30 minutes left and the film hasn't really started.

It then all gets even sillier, even more unrealistic and uninterested characters, you've never cared one iota for disappear with the help of over the top editing and flashbacks.

You can't help wondering why not one of them, ever got into a car or on a bike and rode off somewhere, instead of walking for 10 minutes, then stopping to rest for a few hours.

Worth watching for the first 15 minutes, then you're better off making up your own film from then - with the likelihood it'll end up better.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

I could go to great pains to write a long, in depth review of The Last Seven, but it's hard to write much more about it other than my summary above. Right from the opening sequence, with one of the lead characters wondering around a deserted London shouting out for 'anybody!', just like in the aforementioned film, it just feels like such a pale imitation of it that it hurts. In fact, it's almost as if the director knew he was practically copying it scene for scene and just gave up bothering to tell any sort of decent story of his own. As such, it just goes through the motions of the post apocalyptic thriller genre, with the usual stereo-typical set up and characters, without firmly establishing the back story behind the majority of humanity being wiped out and making no sense. Most baffling is Danny Dyer's role as some sort of blood crazed zombie type character, probably the most mysterious thing about the whole uninspired mess. *

Artistically fantastic - a wow take of the streets of London post-weirdness not so sure it continues to engage every viewer beyond the first 5 minutes watch, but don't expect a Hollywood Blockbuster