7 Lives

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Tom (Danny Dyer) is a married man with kids who's been tempted with an offer of a better life by a seductive new client. On his way home, he finds himself accosted by a group of hoodies who chase and mug him, leaving him battered within an inch of his life. As his existence hangs in the balance, he finds himself living out in his head a series of different lives, including one of his assailants, a homeless man, a rock star and a boxer. As crunch time comes on his life, he must choose whether he prefers one of his made up lives or his real one.

Over thirty years ago, despite his powerful, imposing presence in the film Scum, it would probably have been hard for anyone to imagine Ray Winstone, with his working class background and heavy London accent, could have gone on to conquer Hollywood. But he did, and in more recent times, he appeared to have a successor in the shape of Danny Dyer, who burst onto the scene with force in The Football Factory, and also carried WC roots and a heavy London brogue. But, at his current rate, it seems the success Winstone went on to enjoy will continue to elude him, as he makes an ever increasing string of low budget, low grade straight to DVD entries, the latest of which is this ambitious but hopelessly muddled and unsuccessful 'converging tales' piece.

7 Lives has an intriguing concept, but somehow it manages to go off the rails almost as soon as it's begun, with a confused and meandering story that fails to make much sense or relevance in relation to it's central protagonist or to the audience. Dyer himself seems to be feeling the script's weakness and turns in one of his more wooden performances, which when matched with the vocabulary he's asked to read out with his deep London accent, is just asking for trouble. By less than about half way in, it's completely lost your interest and the story just drags on feeling more and more nonsensical and flat as it goes on.

It seems a problem with British actors is their inability to refuse work, and in Dyer's case that seems to be tenfold. One only hopes he lands with an agent that can get him to see sense and separate the wheat from the chaff before it's too late. **