"I didn't go into this with the highest hopes. How much can you honestly expect from a straight-to-dvd release? Regardless, snipes is a great action actor, so I decided to check it out. The first 20 minutes or so were actually very good! It begins with an elaborately planned armored car company robbery ending in a pretty cool car chase and a terrible double-cross. But then, it spirals downhill quickly. The middle of this movie was soooo boring I almost gave up.
The movie begins with snipes as an ex-special forces kind of guy now on the wrong side of the law. He plans this elaborate armored car company robbery, that goes terribly wrong. The woman he's "with" in the beginning gets kidnapped and he obviously has to rescue her. After the robbery goes wrong, he car jacks a lady who just happens to be a military official who must not be very busy because after she then makes it her personal mission to catch snipes. However, she SLOWLY, VERY SLOWLY, like so slow you could fall asleep, starts to realize that there are much badder people involved in the whole mess and then in the end teams up with snipes to get the real baddies. After the VERY SLOW middle part, the movie ends in another car chase.
This movie is almost totally predictable, it's not a very good story, and the acting is pretty poor. I think snipes did a good job with what was handed to him, and some of the action sequences were good. But for the most part, this was just another straight to dvd movie that we have grown to expect from people like van damn and seagal. Definitely a step back for snipes.
Rent it if you like, but buying it would be silly. You'll never watch it twice, and you probably won't even get through it once. Only die-hard snipes fans will be interested in this one. Hope this helps.
Oh, and by the way, maybe it was discussed in the boring middle somewhere, or maybe I just blinked and missed it, but why the heck was this movie called "7 Seconds" anyways?"
Dissapointing
Scott Williams | 08/05/2005
(1 out of 5 stars)
"I work for hollywood video and this movie has been rented out for like 3 or 4 weeks since it was released on dvd, so I figured since it's been renting so much then it must be good, right? Man, it was so hard to get through this movie. Like, most of the reviews have said, the beginning part was alright but after that it just took a nose dive. I really wanted to turn this movie off in the middle cause I just couldn't take it but I was able to get through it (with a little fast forwarding). The acting was just so bad and the story was pointless. So, whatever you do please don't watch this movie...believe me, you'll thank me in the future."
"7 Seconds" Starts Promisingly, Then Runs out of Gas Soon
Tsuyoshi | Kyoto, Japan | 04/02/2007
(2 out of 5 stars)
"The latest heist by a professional thief and his team goes terribly awry, and the organizer of the flawless plans gets more than what he bargained for. Agents and mobsters chase him, but he keeps cool under pressure, frustrates other party's plans and can always extricate himself from the mire. This is a standard story format for action film. It looks clichéd and predictable, but it works well with good rhythm in action and sure-handed guidance from the director. But "7 Seconds" doesn't have them.
Wesley Snipes plays the thief named Jack. Jack's failed robbery in Bucharest, Rumania, lands him in a fresh trouble because his girlfriend/partner-in-crime is kidnapped during the shoot-outs. He takes hostage a NATO military cop (Tamzin Outhwaite sporting her British accent) after the mayhem (and saving her life too), and engages in urban car chase with familiar settings. The story doesn't make much sense (why steal the money of casinos in Rumania?), but the earlier part of "7 Seconds" is fun with decent car stunts and a little bit of humor. The actions are confusing, and you don't know where these wildly running cars are going, but at least the stunts themselves are not bad.
Then in the film's middle section tedium settles in, which stops the actions and starts to introduce superfluous characters, plus an unnecessary plot twist or two. We don't need to see Wesley Snipes walking in the station and putting a brief case in the coin locker there. Or actually we don't care what the briefcase really contains at all; and we don't even want to know whether something in it (whatever it is) is real or not. We want thrill and action, or funny dialogues. Except for some brief martial arts stunts and mildly amusing banter between Snipes and Outhwaite, "7 Seconds" doesn't have much to show, particularly in its second part, where the film has another car stunt sequence involving street cars, but it is marred by choppy editing.
We often hear complaint or criticism about direct-to-video films, but actually some of them are pretty good, offering diverting 90 minutes like the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. Unfortunately, for all the fairly good acting from the stars, Wesley Snipes' "7 Seconds" is not one of them."
I should've read the reviews before renting it
chicoer2003 | Fresno, CA United States | 09/05/2005
(2 out of 5 stars)
"7 Seconds is a formulaic capper that's not entertaining at all. The car chases are ok, but nothing to write home about. It's a regular Snipes movie, but lacking fun. It's long, illogical (which isnt bad if it's entertaining), and just plain boring."
Answering the '7 Seconds' question
E. J. Culhane | 07/21/2005
(2 out of 5 stars)
"I am a Wesley Snipes fan, and not all that hard to please, but I must agree with previous reviewer - EAGAN, MN - that this is a lame movie and one I have no desire to ever see again. To answer the question about where the title came from, the timers on the phony explosive charges Snipe's gang uses on the first three armored cars, to get the more complicated robbery in motion, were set at 7 seconds. Just why this inconsequential fact deserves to be the title remains a mystery to me."