7 Minutes is the kind of movie old theaters would plug in as a B-movie flick to keep audiences entertained after or before a main event. It’s a repetitive, derivative and weirdly boring heist flick that really doesn’t deserve more than a moment’s thought once the credits start.
Luke Mitchell (Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD) stars as Sam, a once-promising high school quarterback whose future fell apart after he broke his ankle. He’s struggled to get used to small-town life in Washington state and his girlfriend, former cheerleader Kate (Leven Rambin, True Detective season two) is pregnant. Then he gets laid off.
Sam decides to become a drug dealer with his friend, ex-con Owen (Zane Holtz, From Dusk Till Dawn) and his married brother Mike (Jason Ritter). When a drug deal goes bad, they plan to rob a bank to make up for the loss, but things don’t go as planned.
Directed by music video director Jay Martin, 7 Minutes - which gets its name from the time it’s supposed to take to rob the bank - actually starts with the robbery. Then, Martin tries to present the story as a fractured puzzle, with different perspectives to help us put it together. Unfortunately, this trick wears thin very quickly because he even gives us the perspective of minor characters, with their names flashing on the screen. Had he kept it to just the main trio, some of the twists would have been harder-hitting and this 82-minute movie might not have felt longer than it really is.
Martin was clearly impressed with his own story idea, but there’s so much heavy-handed use of slow motion and clear Tarantino wannabe moments that he seems to have forgotten to put much effort in every other aspect of filmmaking. Everything else is heist movie cliche. There’s attempts at clever camerawork, which only come off as annoying. Martin, you really don’t have to keep the camera spinning around your characters during an entire conversation.
The acting is rather nondescript. Mitchell isn’t really an appealing leading man and Rambin really doesn’t get a chance to do much other than scream and look disappointed. Kris Kristofferson can also randomly be spotted as Owen’s dad.
The Starz/Anchor Bay Blu-ray will be released on Sept. 1. There’s only two bonus features and both are pretty useless. “Linear Heist” is a 17-minute supercut of just the bank heist itself and “Storyboard to Scene” is an eight-minute reel of scenes stacked on top of storyboards.
7 Minutes can at least be praised for trying out a different way to tell a story about a heist, but there’s just not much substance to it. You can pass on this.
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