Review #33 THE LAST SEVEN (2010, Imran Naqvi)

 

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A man wakes up alone in a deserted London and discovers that he and six others appear to be the only people left alive.

Starring  Tamer Hassan, Simon Phillips, Ronan Vibert, Daisy Head, Danny Dyer

Written by  John Stanley   

Produced by  Simon Phillips, Toby Meredith   

Duration  84 minutes   

   

 

Well, that was a disappointment. Multiple, in fact.

Here are my top seven disappointing things about THE LAST SEVEN.

Disappointment #1: Not enough Danny Dyer.

For a while back there, Danny Dyer was kind of a star. He was certainly well known – in the UK, at least. He’s now firmly entrenched in the acting retirement of misery soap Eastenders, but at one point he must have had grander ambitions.

Curiously, there was never any attempt to break America. It seems impossible that the idea never crossed his mind. Was he irredeemably bad at the accent? Did he flat-out refuse to soften up and do a romcom, or be a comedy sidekick, or try out a gay best friend? Or was the concept of ‘geezer’ not meaning someone over 65 simply unfathomable to Hollywood casting directors?

Something I’ve always disputed is Dyer’s reputation for ‘hard man’ roles. Does it come from the straight-to-home-media portion of his career, all those buried on streaming or end of the supermarket aisle DVD efforts – films that have had zero impact on the cultural landscape? It must do, because here is the evidence from his best-known titles:

 – HUMAN TRAFFIC: Caught by his mum wanking in his bedroom during a phone sex call = not a hard man.

– MEAN MACHINE: Mild mannered and timid on the football pitch, despite being in prison = not a hard man.

– THE FOOTBALL FACTORY: Spends the whole film worried about getting his head kicked in; eventually does get his head kicked in = not a hard man.

– THE BUSINESS: Lets frequent collaborator Tamer Hassan (see below) and weaselly Geoff Bell push him around for an hour and a half = not a hard man.

– OUTLAW: Spends the whole film worried about getting his head kicked in; it doesn’t happen this time, but he does look awkward when required to wield a pump-action shotgun = not a hard man.

– STRAIGHTHEADS: Has sex with Gillian Anderson (plus) but then fails to protect her from getting attacked and raped (minus) = not a hard man.

– SEVERANCE: Survives a work retreat in the Hungarian countryside that turns into a life or death struggle against sadistic poachers, but only by numbing himself to the ordeal by quaffing magic mushrooms = not a hard man.

In THE LAST SEVEN, he plays ‘The Angel of Death’, a mysterious, bloodied and blindfolded figure who keeps popping up on the periphery to try to give the film some tension and urgency.

And, criminally, apart from some opening and closing voiceover, where his ear-to-the-Bow-Bells lilt is distinctly toned down, he never speaks. Boo.

Disappointment #2: Not enough Danny Dyer and Tamer Hassan together.

If Dyer could have been the geezer De Niro, then Tamer Hassan was his Joe Pesci – with, of course, Nick Love as their Scorsese.

After the abovementioned Love pair of FACTORY and BUSINESS, they also cameoed together in spoof THE HOOLIGAN FACTORY, as well as both essaying DEAD MAN RUNNING, FREERUNNER and CITY RATS.

That means THE LAST SEVEN ties them with the number of projects Bob D and Joe P did together on (funnily enough) seven. Except, much like Pesci’s quickie appearances in A BRONX TALE, THE GOOD SHEPHERD and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, they aren’t screen partners this time.

Disappointment #3: Missed opportunity with London locations.

The movie opens 28 DAYS LATER-style with a man waking up in an empty London. And of course, he’s right in the centre of the city, somewhere between Bank tube and Fenchurch Street, by the looks of it. Now, okay, fine, that’s fair enough for starters, you have to give the people what they expect.

But why not show some lesser-photographed parts of London in your movie, for a change? Would it kill you to travel south a little and dolly up Brixton high street? Pan away from the Catford cat statue at a Dutch angle? Give us a crane shot of the Ladywell water tower?

Disappointment #4: Nothing happens for ages.

I mean, okay, you’ve managed to get the entire Square Mile deserted to film in, presumably on a summer’s Sunday morning, with the coming-down ravers on their way home kept at bay by a production assistant just out of shot.

But why drag the solo opening on for nearly 20 minutes, especially when the entire film is only 84? That's nearly a quarter of the running time! And especially when it's not even an original opening, having already been done by a much better film 10 years earlier (as well as being transposed to Atlanta for the pilot of The Walking Dead).

Disappointment #5: When more characters are finally introduced, still nothing much happens.

Tamer plays a military man (with a machine gun and everything) and there’s also a posh politician type and a young woman.

After lots of wandering about between skyscrapers and speculating as to why no one else seems to be around and why none of them can remember what happened, the latter of those says, ‘We have to go somewhere, we have to do something!’

I wasn’t sure if she was addressing another character or pleading with the offscreen director.

Disappointment #6: It’s all backstory.

As the number of survivors reaches the anticipated amount, intermittent flashbacks gradually (and I do mean gradually) reveal what went down before the world turned to shit.

But it would have been better to structure the story so that what the characters are doing now was more compelling than what went on before. 

Better acting, characters we care about and tolerable dialogue also would have helped matters, too.

Disappointment #7: There’s a guy in it who looks a bit like Alan Rickman (Ronan Vibert), but he’s not Alan Rickman.

And although the much-missed thespian was still with us in 2011, he wouldn’t have touched a tepid project like THE LAST SEVEN with a ten-foot pole.

And neither should you.

One star out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  The whole convoluted plot curdles into something completely baffling by the end, so your guess is as good as mine. And you’ve probably never even seen this thing.

What would a movie called THE FIRST SEVEN be about?  How about profiling the top seven number sevens in Premier League history? Ooh, let’s see. I’d say... Cantona, Beckham, Pires, Le Tissier, Ronaldo, Luis Suarez and Son Heung-min. And as a plus, that’s definitely something Danny and Tamer could settle down on the sofa with a case of lager and happily watch together.

Previously:  LAST HOLIDAY

Next time:  THE LAST STARFIGHTER

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #32 LAST HOLIDAY (2006, Wayne Wang)

 

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A department store assistant is diagnosed with a rare brain condition and only has weeks to live, so she takes off on a luxury holiday to Europe.

Starring  Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu, Alicia Witt, Giancarlo Esposito 

Written by  Jeffrey Price, Peter S Seaman   

Produced by  Laurence Mark, Jack Rapke   

Duration  112 minutes   

   

Dear Mom,

Greetings from sunny Hollywood! Yes, I made it here in one piece! Sorry for not writing sooner, but I wanted to be able to put a return address – the Studio City YMCA just wasn’t gonna cut it!

But now I’m sitting here writing to you on my own desk (second hand) in my own room, in my own apartment! Well, I got the living room anyway, the sofa bed. It’s a one-bedroom, see, and I’m rooming with this British guy I met in the Y, who also wants to be a screenwriter. He’s got the bedroom, I got the living room, but don’t worry ma, he pays more of the rent.

And you’ll be pleased to hear that this letter isn’t the only thing I’m writing. Yes, I’ve started working on my first screenplay!

Okay, so here it goes. It’s about this woman, like an everywoman – like ‘everyman’, but a lady! She’s kind of like… not a loser, exactly, but definitely not happy. She buys her food with a big pile of coupons, her only social activity is singing in the church choir, she lives in a rundown neighbourhood near a bridge (alone, of course), with a shitty car that barely runs.

And, you know, she works in a department store in a real crappy job and her boss is a total jerk – like, his cell phone rings and he actually answers it in front of her, and all he cares about is money, whereas she wants to make the customers happy, that kind of thing. So yeah, like, overall, she’s real good natured and everybody loves her and all of that.

And those food coupons, they’re not just some random detail, Mom! You see, what she really wants to be is a chef. When she gets home every day, she watches TV cooking shows, and prepares all the food along with the TV chef. And she takes photos of the dishes she cooks and puts them in a scrapbook. It’s like a dream book for her, her aspiration book or something. Maybe that’s what I’ll call it in the screenplay!

But for sure she definitely also has this other book called ‘Possibilities’, where she’s cut and pasted the head of a guy she’s in love with onto photos next to herself. He’s her dream man, and he’s also her colleague! No, Mom, I know what you’re thinking. It’s not going to be creepy. It’s going to be real sweet and charming! 

Anyways, so here’s where it gets real interesting. This is the best part. Now, I gotta admit up front, I didn’t exactly come up with this idea totally from my own little mind. My roomie, he was reading this book named Last Holiday, by this old English writer who goes by JB Priestley. And Mom, I didn’t actually read the book or anything (you know me!), but I did read the back of it. And I don’t know anything about getting rights or permission or whatever, but I’ll worry about that later – this is the kind of idea that is too good to ignore.

You see, I was looking for a way to set the woman in my movie free, but how? What would make it so she can burst out of her funk and finally make the most of her life?

Well, this is it, here goes: she finds out she only has three weeks to live!

Isn’t that genius? Isn’t that original?

So she marches into her boss’s office and not only does she quit, she grabs his cell phone and smashes it on the floor! Wham! ‘That was a $200 phone!” he yells. I might even put the dialogue in capital letters!

So what next? She decides she’s gonna live her dream of being a chef in, now get this Mom, tell me this is not totally awesome: Europe! Can you believe that?

Now, when I told this to my British roomie, he said something really weird. He said that Europe is not, like, just this one place that’s kinda all of the same. He claims it’s actually a continent full of many different countries, all with unique cultures and that we Americans should stop lumping an entire continent together like we do. He said that was totally ignorant! 

Well, boo to him. This is gonna be an American movie for Americans. And in this American movie, my American leading lady goes to Europe and does European things with all those quirky, cute little European people. And snooty, right? Those Europeans are kinda snooty, everyone knows that. Of course, we'll make her spend most of the movie with other Americans who have also gone abroad, because we can't have too many Europeans around, that would be crazy.

I guess she can fly to France? In first class, of course. France is in Europe, right? That’s the one with Paris, I think. I think I heard once that they have, like, a lot of food in France. So that could be where she goes to learn how to cook. I'm not sure yet. Hey, remember that movie GREEN CARD, where they had that guy who was French (or was he English?) who had to pretend to be married to Andie MacDowell to stay in the US of A? Imagine if they ended up casting him as a celebrity chef who trains her! That would be super sweet.

Heck, maybe I just won’t even say which one of those cute little European countries she’s gone to, what difference does it make? That way, we can have all kinds of accents and languages and whatever all together, to be extra quirky and hilarious.

So anyways, you know, she goes to this European spa hotel place, and flies a helicopter, and goes skiing, and base-jumping, and has a PRETTY WOMAN-style shopping montage in a fancy department store, and does a load of other kinds of awesome things (all in a super cute and quirky European style).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Three weeks to live? Major downer! But no, Mom, and this is where you’re really gonna see how all the money to send me to UCLA was totally worth it. Because, okay, get this: it turns out she actually isn’t about to die! Maybe the brain scanning machine or whatever was actually broken! Or maybe the doctor made a mistake, like he looked at her chart upside down or something! I’d probably have to make him European, too, or at least some kind of foreigner, if he's gonna be one of these real quirky, campy, useless doctors.

So that’s gonna mean I can write an awesome happy ending, where she’s had the time of her life, and realised that life is all worth living after all, and got her man, and opened her own restaurant, all of that. The audience is gonna walk out of theatres with a smile as wide as the Hollywood sign!

Right, gotta go. Just thinking about this awesome screenplay makes me wanna get back to it! Love to Dad and little Billy-Joe and Susie-Anne.

Sincerely,

Your loving son

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Since she is not, in fact, about to die, it would be extremely unlikely for her to never go on another holiday.

What would a movie called FIRST HOLIDAY be about?  Personally, I spent a lot of my youth in the Yorkshire coastal towns of Scarborough and Bridlington (both in Europe, for the record).

Previously:  X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

Next time:  THE LAST SEVEN

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

Review #31 X-MEN: THE LAST STAND (2006, Brett Ratner)

 

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Three groups squabble over a cure for mutation: the X-Men; other mutants who are bad and so not part of the X-Men; and some nefarious non-mutants (AKA humans).

Starring  Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, Kelsey Grammar

Written by  Simon Kinberg, Zak Penn

Produced by  Lauren Shuler Donner, Ralph Winter, Avi Arad

Duration  104 minutes

Quiz time! What do these films all have in common?

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, ANT-MAN AND THE WASP, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, ALI G INDAHOUSE, TOY STORY 2, TOY STORY 3 and X-MEN: THE LAST STAND. 

Answer: they all start with a ‘fake-action prologue’, where we’re supposed to believe that our characters are in peril, but it turns out they were safe all along. This is not to be confused with beginning the movie in medias res, like all the other Bonds and the Indiana Jones series, where our hero is in the middle of an adventure that is not part of this film’s story, but is nevertheless a real incident with actual stakes.

Usually these fake-outs are a dream or a flashback or some kind of simulation/training. It’s the third example that (eventually) accounts for the opening of X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, and while up until now I’ve only ever found this trope to be mildly irritating, something about how director Brett Ratner starts THE LAST STAND (not to be confused with THE LAST STAND) really got on my nerves.

I think it’s because the man can’t decide on an opening so instead gives us three in a row, kind of like the opposite of the protracted endings in that final LORD OF THE RINGS film.

First, we have some kind of Jean Grey origin story flashback ("20 years earlier"), featuring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen with creepy mid-noughties uncanny valley GCI de-aging, where Ratner at least gets the tedious contractually-obliged Stan Lee cameo out the way early doors.

Then, there's another flashback ("10 years earlier") to a father walking in on his son cutting off his nascent wings in the bathroom, a boy who will grow up to become Ben Foster’s mutant Angel.

Then, following the credits, we have the actual opening ("In the not-too-distant future"), where Wolverine, Storm, Rogue et al are fighting some giant robot thing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland/studio backlot, which – yes – turns out to be a Star Trek holodeck-style setup. Wolverine defeats the enemy all by himself, going against Storm’s insistence that "we work as a team". Then as they walk out, Halle Berry delivers more lines like "You can't just change the rules when you feel like it!" and "This isn't a game!", all the time wondering if she has to start wearing her fucking Oscar on a chain around her neck to get sent any decent scripts.

And the rest of the film?

Well, Bill Duke turns up in a DR STRANGELOVE-style war room among other important-looking bureaucrats. Kelsey Grammer makes sure he hits all his cues so he has to spend as little time in the blue make-up chair as possible. Ratner gives Anthony Heald a cameo as ‘FBI Mystique Interrogator’ in a nod to his own RED DRAGON (bad idea) or possibly THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (bad idea – but for the opposite reason).

Vinnie Jones reminds us that he was once a thing; Elliot Page is still Ellen Page; Famke Janssen is angrier and more sexed-up than usual; James Marsden is barely in it; R Lee Ermey does his drill sergeant thing but sadly only off screen; Harper’s boss from TV's Industry is one of the bad mutants and also apparently a hedgehog; and all in all the whole mess puts the viewer in the unusual position of pining for Bryan Singer.

Two stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  No, they went on to make loads more X-MEN movies, with no doubt many more to come long into the future until we’re all old and dead and mouldy in the ground.

What would a movie called X-MEN: THE FIRST STAND be about?  I’d have to look into the history of the source comic books, which is never going to happen.

Previously:  THE LAST SAMURAI 

Next time:  LAST HOLIDAY

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com