The Last Seven was premiered earlier this year and released straight to DVD in August of this year, which would normally exclude films from being reviewed here on the Gyre, being an up to the minute, cinema release only review blog. However, the good people of Portsmouth were treated to a very special 'south coast premiere' as part of the Portsmouth Film Festival at the excellent No.6 cinema. I just so happened to be a part of that crowd, and thus watched said film and I have to say... I was pleasantly surprised. For an hour and a half film, Danny Dyer didn't open his mouth once.
Other than that small delight, there really are no redeeming features in this film. The plot is a cross between 28 Days Later and The Da Vinci Code. They even replicated the famous Cillian Murphy deserted bridge shot, but they've made it so much cheaper and worse. The plot was very loosely tied together but some quasi-religious doctrine and flashbacks of what happened before they found themselves alone in deserted London, but it all just seems so forced and lucky. The dialogue was absolutely dreadful and wooden, this just really was an extremely poorly written film with recycled plot elements and ideas, and lines we all heard in bog standard horror thrillers 30 years ago.
Tamer Hassan plays the big, cockney Army guy with a gun. Not exactly a wide stretch of the imagination, but he still manages to mess it up. On this evidence, he's clearly not cut out for acting, but he could easily stand outside pubs, turning away 16 year olds. Highlights of his 'performance' included announcing he was going for a piss, shooting a decanter of Cognac out of an old man's hand, and falling to his knees and really trying to cry in front of a bloody schoolgirl. Then there's the lead (?) protagonist who seems to been chopping up too many onions as his eyes are constantly swelled up, red and on the verge of crying, which he does. A lot. He also shouts things about staying together as a team. Then, our young female teenager who, as the rebel she is, has to slip the word 'fuck' into every sentence whether it needs it or not. This seems to provoke Hassan into saying 'fuck' an awful lot, leading to them having am unspoken contest as to who can say it more, or to put it another way, a 'fuck off'. Then there's the Portugese woman who can speak English when she wants to, an old drunkard, a supposed Army captain and the mysterious middle aged man who constantly recites scripture who hides the darkest secret of them all. The message here is religion is bad, kids.
I won't spoil the twist ending or the explanation of the entire plot, but needless to say, by the time it gets to the reveal, you don't really care. Any explanation they could have possibly offered would not explain why you've just sat through a terrible film. I was mildly impressed they managed to film in an empty London in the middle of the day, not early morning like 28 Days Later, and was also mildly impressed Danny Dyer was in a film and didn't ruin it. Throughout the film, Dyer's role involves him wearing a blindfold and a hood and being covered in blood as he plays... the Angel of Death. Yep. He doesn't say a word, just snatches people and digs out their eyes with his thumbs. It sounds ridiculous but honestly, it really fits in with the sheer stupidity and ridiculousness that is The Last Seven.
Overall, this film is just simply bad. It's not even a good kind of bad, that kind of bad where you want to watch it to laugh at how bad it is. It's just plain bad. There are absolutely no redeeming features for this film, it's acted poorly, it's written poorly and it's been shot poorly. Psst, the shaky first person stalker camera from around a corner has been done a gazillion times. Stop it. I can't even bring myself to give this film a symbolic half a star, it honestly deserves a big fat zero. In a brief Q&A session after the film, producer Toby Meredith (who seems to be a lovely man, if a little misguided in his support for the script) informed us this film was shot on a budget of £150,000. I, for one, am glad that no more money than that was wasted on this atrocity of moving pictures.
Rating: 0
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