On my, oh my, where has the promising career of Wesley Snipes gone, he mixed it up with Stallone in demolition man, played alongside Sean Connery in Rising Sun, even had his own comic book trilogy of movies, and now he's decided to muscle in on Seagal, Van Damme & Lungren territory - the straight to video market ! This film sucks in most departments, the only reason I gave it 3 stars is a few of the action scenes were decent and the ending was OK, in the sense it woke me from my comatose state that the rest of the movie put me in ! The script is so bad that actors have absolutely nothing to work with, for a 90 minute movie it drags unbelievably from one scene to the next. just when you think the storyline is going to pick up they start showing you flashbacks of scenes earlier in the movie which you've already scene a thousand times !!, Tamzin Outhwaite does OK with the little characterization she is given, apart from spitting out some cheesy cockney lines god knows where they picked up from and looking pretty she isn't asked to do much else. Wesley also does a credible job if you can call it that with this scrip, though I use the term credible lightly because he should have his head read for choosing this script ! the story line is so full of holes, and pointless narrative its a waste of time me even writing about it, as a snipes fan I watched this, and recently with the likes of Zig Zag, Undisputed and then Unstoppable coming from Wesley I was hoping for an upturn in quality, but yet again he failed me with this film, so poor I can't believe I wrote this much about it !!

With its supporting cast of faces familiar from British television, 7 SECONDS resembles nothing so much as a humdrum episode of THE BILL and indeed it has production values more in line with a TV series than a feature film. Stylistically, it's close to the kind of DTV trash Seagal has been churning out for years, a made-in-Eastern Europe thriller with an imported American star and not much else to recommend it.

Snipes sleepwalks through his role of an art thief with a conscience and, for a film that exists solely due to his presence, he doesn't seem to have much screen time. He engages in a couple of fights and a couple of car chases but for a long time he's imprisoned and doing very little. It's sad when an actor's presence is wasted thus, because Snipes is by far the most interesting thing in the movie and the rest is just trash, clearly inspired by the BOURNE movies.

The plot involves the hero and his allies being hunted down by various bad guys. This time around the baddies are Romanian gangsters, the usual street trash. Most of the characters are interchangeable and all of them are uninteresting. Tamzin Outhwaite is a well known face on British telly but seems severely out of her depth here and it's more than a little unusual seeing the likes of DOCTORS' Stephen Boxer and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE's Adrian Lukis turning up in minor parts. Best of the lot is Deobia Oparei who's a lot of fun as Snipes' buddy but that's certainly no reason to tune in to this bargain basement mess of a movie.

The awful screenplay of "7 Seconds", which looks like a Steven Seagal movie, is so absurd and full of clichés, and has many huge holes, beginning with the selection of Wesley Snipes for the lead role. I have never been in Romania, but I believe that there are not much Afro-Americans living and circulating in Bucharest. Therefore, it would not be difficult to find Jack Tuliver in the middle of the locals. Another interesting point is the attraction of beautiful white women for his character, probably with the intention to show that Romanian and British women are not racist. In the bus station, he fights with two guys and there is no policeman in the area. There are lots of characters coming and going without any previous development or later appearance. The stupid character of the dyed Kelly Anders is ridiculous, as well as most of the dialogs along the story. The predictable plot point is very weak. Last but not the least, when an action movie does not have much story to show, usually there are lots of cars chase in the script, for the pride and joy of the stunts (there are exceptions, of course, like "Ronin", "The Blues Brothers", "The Transporter " and others). My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "7 Segundos" ("7 Seconds")