Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

William, as played by Simon Phillips, wakes up face down in the street in the middle of London. The odd thing is that he seems to be the only inhabitant of London England, which before today had a reported seven million people. William proceeds to walk around London, for what felt like forever, looking for some signs of life. Eventually William will stumble upon six more people, all as confused as he is. Thus this is why this mysterious thriller is titled ‘The Last Seven’ as our crew walks around London, like forever, to find out where all the people have gone.

Let’s meet this eclectic crew, shall we? We have Sgt. Mason (Tamer Hassan) who is hostile, has a big gun and has taken charge. Tamer Hassan playing the part of a large angry man, what a surprise. Then there’s Chloe (Daisy Head), the foul mouthed waif of a teenage girl and we also have Henry (John Mawson) a really tall erudite man who has found a good friend in a decanter of cognac. Eventually these four will run into Captain Kendrick (Sebastian Street) who will eventually be our take charge guy and he will be accompanied by Isabelle (Rita Ramnani) who insists on speaking Portuguese and finally there’s Isaac (Ronan Vibert) who prays a lot and likes to rip off bible quotes. In real life having a healthy knowledge of the Good Book is usually a good thing, in the movies… not so much.

So here’s the situation for our crew. They have no idea who they are as their memories are gone, and if it weren’t for the wallets in their pockets they wouldn’t even know their names. London is completely empty, the clocks have stopped working and there’s a hooded figure wearing a blindfold running around observing them (Danny Dyer), and he’s covered in blood. Again, this cannot be a positive thing.

Every once in a while, however, a member of our team will experience a flashback as to who they might be or what might have went down that caused this apparent catastrophe. All we know for certain is that this all has something to do with a kidnapped little girl and the attempt to rescue her. And the hooded figure has gotten involved, one by one removing our survivors from the equation. What is going on?

I don’t quite know what to tell you about Omar Naqvi’s directorial debut ‘The Last Seven’ my friends. The setup is an interesting one, if not oft used, but interesting nonetheless and I probably should dig into the DVD extras to see how Naqvi managed to make London look deserted. So London is deserted via an apocalyptic event or Divine Intervention or whatever, and I am engaged to find out why, with the gloomy mood cast over the exercise adding to the tension of whatever the hell was going on. Admittedly it did start out quite slowly. I mean watching Simon Phillips walk around London for an eternity was testing. I understand that our character needed confirmation that London was empty, but I got it. A while ago.

Then we meet the rest of our characters in this film, who will proceed to do some more walking around, but their travels will be interspersed with the flashbacks. Now these flashbacks were necessary in the sense it broke the monotony of watching our characters walk and bicker, but did they add to the story? That’s debatable. On the surface, sure they did. It set up everything that was going on and eventually gave us our big reveal, probably broadcasting this long before it needed to be forecast, but when we do get to our big reveal a lot of what we have seen stops making sense. And I realize that making a British film without Danny Dyer is difficult, and this isn’t an attack on Dyer himself, but I think we could’ve done without his narration in this one and probably even the character they had him play. It just seemed to further confuse things, unnecessarily so.

Then there’s the revelation itself, which certainly raises more questions than answers, at least as far as why our heroes are in the situation that they are in, if not how they got into this situation. And then there was the final scene which seems to be something tacked on simply because they could do it.

But I don’t want to give the indication that we hated ‘The Last Seven’ because this certainly wasn’t the case. I loved the look, some of the performances were rock solid and the setup for this story was an intriguing one. But it was slow, unnecessarily confusing at times and often inert which forces us to ask the question, after it is all said and done, what was the point? For that I have no answer.