7 Minutes

As sure as a story takes place in Anytown, U.S.A., during Anytime, A.D., there live a boy and a girl who share a dream that starts and stops with “getting out of this town.” So it goes with Sam and Kate.
Sam (Luke Mitchell) was the all-American poster boy in high school, the star quarterback with a college scholarship and beautiful cheerleader girlfriend, and a big deal in his small town. Three years later he’s still with Kate (Leven Rambin)—still beautiful, now pregnant—but his football and college career has been cut short thanks to a broken ankle his first game out. He’d been punching the clock as a factory worker to pay the bills and build a nest egg for the baby on the way, but took a gig as a minor-league drug dealer after he was laid off. When Sam and his two cohorts, friend Owen (Zane Holtz) and brother Mike (Jason Ritter), flush their first high-stakes assignment down the toilet, they are given 48 hours to come up with thousands of dollars and decide to rob a bank.
This sets the stage for 7 Minutes, writer-director Jay Martin’s feature debut. The film’s official poster—three masked men strutting against a black and red backdrop beneath a giant “7” shaped like a pistol—suggest Martin’s first film is a heist movie less Lock, Stock meets All the Right Moves and more Reservoir Dogs, an effect surely not lost on its designers and hardly the film’s only Tarantino nod.
The whole of 7 Minutes takes place inside the bank and unfolds over nonlinear flashbacks of three storylines. Sam, Mike and Owen are introduced with big Tarantino-ish title cards filling the frame, though Sam’s is clearly the guiding narrative. The opening scene barges through the screen with guns blazing, pace fast and tempers hot, but as the film wanders around in its own backyard, its attempt to rekindle that initial spark proves unsuccessful. Investment in the outcome of the film’s real-time action shifts to the minutes spent outside the titular 7—the time allotted to get in, get out, and get on with their lives—to where jumping back to the present scene of the crime starts to feel like a formality.