7 seconds movie review

'Seven Seconds' Review: Netflix's Latest Is An Addictive Procedural

Netflix's new series Seven Seconds is an addictive procedural drama that starts off as a murder mystery and turns into something else. The show isn't so much concerned with the crime at hand as it is the fallout – the trauma that befalls relatives, and the way such events can impact several different lives. Seven Seconds has big issues on its mind, particularly tensions that arise in a community when dealing with a racist police force. Ultimately, it's not entirely successful with its bigger issues, but a series of stellar performances elevate Seven Seconds into something worth watching.

Our Seven Seconds review continues below. Some minor spoilers follow.

Seven Seconds hails from Veena Sud , who developed the American version of The Killing . Like that former AMC series, Seven Seconds is a gritty, often disheartening crime drama that has more on its mind than just a central mystery. This is a show that's very much embroiled in current events. Seven Seconds uses its central crime – the hit and run death of a black child named Brenton Butler in Jersey City – to delve into a drama that deals with issues of race. Namely, the hot-button matter of race relations between an unabashedly racist police force and the black community they push up against. The person who runs down Brenton happens to be a (white) cop, speeding towards the hospital after he gets an emergency call about his pregnant wife. The accident is clearly that – an accident. But when the distraught cop's fellow officers arrive on the scene, they're quick to cover the crime up. The way they see it, the minute the public hears about a white cop running over a black kid, it'll blow up into just another story about a racist police force. In attempting to cover up this situation, they inadvertently create it. It's not long before their terrible action blows up in the media, and the community. And it's not long before someone is able to connect the dots and discover it was cops who did the foul deed. That's the main set-up of Seven Seconds , but the show branches off from there and ventures down more avenues. There's an assistant prosecutor with a drinking problem; a detective with marital issues; a drug addicted witness to the crime with her own baggage. Then there are the tormented parents of the boy so coldly run down and left for dead, struggling to come to terms with their sudden loss while being simultaneously rejected by the system that should be helping them. This is all big, heavy stuff, and Seven Seconds makes all of it work, though it occasionally takes shortcuts that require more than a standard suspension of disbelief.

The Characters

Clare-Hope Ashitey takes the lead as KJ Harper, an assistant prosecutor who gets put in charge of the case involving the hit and run. Before she gets involved with the show's central mystery, we see KJ heavily inebriated, taking part in a bit of drunk karaoke at a local bar. It soon becomes apparent that this isn't a one-time thing; KJ has a drinking problem, and her career is in a bit of a tailspin. She shows up to court unprepared, and she's still reeling from an affair with her boss. Ashitey, who also appeared in Children of Men , is stellar in the role. KJ may fall into the standard "flawed protagonist" category that so many modern shows seem to embrace, but Ashitey's performance is layered and compelling. The way she handles KJ's constant waffling – she's determined to make a difference one minute, then terrified to confront a grieving family the next – is impressive to behold. The only thing that trips the character up is an underdeveloped backstory involving family history. The co-lead of the series, or at least the character who has the second biggest part to play after Ashitey, is Regina King as Latrice Butler, mother of hit-and-run victim Brenton Butler. King has the big, emotional moments of the series, and she never fails to deliver. This is the type of powerful, raw performance that gets awards season attention, and rightfully so. Latrice and her husband are deeply religious, but after their son is taken from them, Latrice's faith falters, and she spirals downward to a point where she's sleeping in her car and contemplating buying a gun to get revenge. Not all of the character motivations are entirely believable on paper, but King's fierce performance manages to make them all work. A surprise stand-out of the series is Michael Mosley , who turns in a funny, quirky performance as Joe "Fish" Rinaldi, a homicide detective who teams up with KJ to look into the Butler case. Like Will Graham on Hannibal , Fish has a house full of stray dogs he's taken in, and the show gets great mileage from quick sight-gags, like Fish reading a dog-centric magazine while waiting to meet another character. While Fish is ultimately on the side of good, and more often than not does the right thing, he's still not above slipping into the type of prejudices that plague the police department. His first assumption when he starts looking into the Brenton Butler case is that Brenton is a banger who likely stole the expensive bike he was riding when he was run down. The chemistry between Mosley and Ashitey, which starts off adversarial but settles into a mutual respect, is a big draw. Russell Hornsby is a powerhouse as Isaiah Butler, husband to Latrice and father to Brenton. It's clear Latrice and Isaiah's marriage is slightly distant before Brenton's death, but afterwards, the rift between the couple widens drastically. While King's storyline as Latrice goes off in its own potentially dangerous direction, Hornsby's Isaiah struggles with his own inner turmoil. He keeps most of his rage and sadness inside, until it erupts in fury. Along the way, he begins to learn things about his son he never know, which complicate things further. Hornsby has a commanding presence, and the show could actually use more of him. Beau Knapp plays Officer Pete Jablonski, the cop who runs over Brenton on quiet, snowy morning. Jablonski is the newest member of an elite anti-gang and drug unit, and after the accident, his team are the people he calls. The team are quick to help him cover things up, but at first, Jablonski seems determined to do the right thing. He wants to turn himself in – it was an accident, after all. Even after the cover-up first goes into place, Jablonski considers ending things. But the deeper into the hole he gets, the more violent and anxious he becomes. Jablonski is the most fleshed-out of all the characters, and Knapp plays him with a jittery, unnerving intensity. The rest of the police squad who purportrate the cover-up consists of actors David Lyons , Raul Castillo and Patrick Murney . Of these three, Lyons, as the team leader, stands out the most, as he seems to be the most duplicitous. While all three of the actors do well in their roles, their characters are the least engaging of the series. Part of this revolves around the fact that the series puts them in more and more outlandish scenarios, to the point where they start to resemble villains from a comic book rather than a team of corrupt cops. One action carried out by the team near the show's conclusion feels particularly ludicrous, and saps the show of some power. The rest of the cast is rounded out by Michelle Veintimilla , playing Jablonski's Lady Macbeth-like wife, who is more than happy to help him purportrate a cover-up as long as it keeps her new family safe; Corey Champagne as a friend of Brendan Butler, who knows more than he's letting on; and Nadia Alexander , as a teenage junkie who happens to witness the accident and develops a sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial relationship with Fish as the cop tries to get her to testify against Jablonski and company. All three performers are quite good, with Champagne in particular having a lengthy, dramatic monologue in which he nearly steals the show.

Is It Too Long, Like Every Netflix Show?

Yes. While Seven Seconds doesn't make the mistake of Marvel shows and run for a torturous 13 episodes, it does overstay its welcome at 10. This becomes apparent in the last four episodes in particular. The first chunk of the series moves at a quick, breakneck pace, burning through characters and storylines with urgency and excitement, making the series inherently bingeable. Then, the show all but grinds to a halt, and staggers across its finish-line. It's as if the writers were on a roll, then realized they had to stretch the story across 10 episodes and started to deliberately pace themselves. The show suffers as a result. Had Seven Seconds been whittled down to 8 episodes instead of 10, it would be a much better series.

What Doesn’t Work

The aforementioned episode count of the show really does bog it down. Without getting into too many spoilers, Seven Seconds all but wraps-up its storyline by episode 7. The minute I realized this, and then realized there were still three more episodes to go, my heart sank. I all-but-knew this was a sign that show was going to torch the goodwill it had built up to drag the story out even longer. Sure enough, I was correct. To be clear: the decisions the show makes in its final three episodes make sense, but they don't quite work with everything that's come before. Another problem Seven Seconds has involves shortcuts. While it's understandable that a TV series wouldn't want to delve into the frequently-boring minuta of police work, more often than not, the show will have characters jumping to dead-on conclusions. The result seems often forced and unbelievable. On that same note, Seven Seconds has a real problem involving characters who neglect to mention things to each other. There's precedence for this. After all, if characters in Jane Austen novels would just confess their feelings and motivations to each other, the books would be only one page long. Still, there's a way to make this work, and Seven Seconds doesn't quite nail it down. As a result, there's a nagging sense that if certain characters would just open their mouths and tell other characters things, Seven Seconds would be a lot cleaner, and a lot more engaging.

As mentioned above, the show really does move quite well. It's addictive television, and it's addictive in a way that doesn't feel manipulative. Some shows will end nearly every episode with a cliffhanger to suck you back in; Seven Seconds avoids this, but still manages to hook the viewer to the point where you feel you must keep watching to see where the show is going to go. The late, great Jonathan Demme directed one of the episodes, and, needless to say, his episode is the best. It's a haunting, quiet episode filled with reflective moments. It comes very early in the series, and one almost wishes the show had stuck with this method of storytelling a little longer before jumping into its mystery. Still, this is one of the very last things Demme directed, and it's a treat to watch his work. Beyond that, the real draw of Seven Seconds is the cast, particularly Clare-Hope Ashitey and Regina King, playing two very different women searching for the same thing. Both actresses take the show into interesting directions, and both are excellent at handling their overall arcs and emotional moments. Seven Seconds ultimately isn't your normal type of murder mystery show. It's more about the fallout; the way people deal with picking up the pieces following the traumatic event.

Seven Seconds arrives on Netflix February 23, 2018 .

Netflix's Seven Seconds Takes Too Long to Get Where It’s Going

There is a lot to like that's buried in Netflix's new drama, "Seven Seconds," but it suffers so greatly from what has been called Netflix Bloat that it's hard to get to the quality underneath. It's a show that is so full of pregnant pauses and self-important segues that it becomes frustrating in the way it wallows in its darkness. Of course, one might argue that a story about grief and injustice should take its time, and I'm certainly not advocating for quick-cut melodrama, but it's impossible to shake the feeling that "Seven Seconds" could have been a 5- or 6-episode season instead of the 10 dropping on you this Friday. Although, you could do worse on what is likely a rainy/snowy February weekend than locking yourself in with this well-acted melodrama about a criminal cover-up and a mother's pain.

Part of my reservation and frustration is that I so wish I could recommend "Seven Seconds" wholeheartedly because of how much I admire the talent of star Regina King . The fact that she was never nominated for an Emmy for her brilliant work on "Southland" is a travesty, only slightly lessened by the fact that the Academy simply couldn't ignore her on "American Crime"—she was nominated for all three seasons and won for two. She's one of those actresses who qualifies as "always good, often great," and I'd use those words to describe her work here as Latrice Butler, a grieving mother whose son Brenton is hit by a car in the opening scenes of "Seven Seconds."

Hit and runs happen every day in America, but the one that happens to Latrice's son in "Seven Seconds" becomes a national story because the car happens to be driven by a white cop. In the opening scenes of the show, Peter Jablonski ( Beau Knapp ) is rushing to get to the hospital to see his pregnant wife because he's worried they're going to lose the baby after she has some medical issues. He's panicked and speeding. And he hits Brenton on his bicycle. Jablonski is a cop, and he's recently become a part of a team of narcotics officers led by the aggressive Mike Diangelo ( David Lyons ). Instead of calling 911, Jablonski calls his new superior officer, and Diangelo quickly tries to cover it up. They frame Brenton as a ‘banger' who should have been in school, and even try to pin the hit and run on a local drunk.

An Assistant DA named KJ Harper ( Clare-Hope Ashitey ) gets the case, and she senses something's not right. Digging a little deeper with another wise-cracking Jersey City cop named ‘Fish' Rinaldi ( Michael Mosley ), they uncover the truth, and race relations in Jersey City explode. Meanwhile, Latrice's family is fractured when her religious husband ( Russell Hornsby ) and military brother-in-law Seth (Zackary Momoh) fight through their grief in different ways. Seth has a gang background and doesn't embrace religion like Brenton's family. Oh, and to add to the drama, KJ is an alcoholic, and Jablonski has a new baby at home when his life spirals out of control.

Clearly, there's a lot of dramatic material in "Seven Seconds," but it often feels like an exercise in miserablism. Creator Veena Sud and her team wallow and linger in pain, whether it's extended scenes of Latrice watching over her son in the hospital or the state of anxious panic in which Jablonski lives after the accident. But it often seems hollow, despite great work by King and a solid turn from Knapp. In too many instances, "Seven Seconds" feels caught between melodrama and cultural commentary, and it's not quite enough of either. Diangelo and his gang of drug-planting criminals feel like caricatures out of a "Shades of Blue" spin-off, and then the show whips back to the Butler home, where King grounds it in something more relatable. It's a show that's all over the map tonally, sometimes feeling like an extended version of " Mystic River ," but there's a reason that was a movie and not a series—it's a difficult energy to maintain for ten hours.

However, there are performances that often elevate "Seven Seconds" above its flaws. Ashitey has a fascinating character in that KJ is the black sheep of the family, and she captures well the kind of person who flees from conflict or stress into a bottle or a bed. Her scenes with Mosley become the most interesting on the show because they bridge the gap between the melodrama of the Butler/Jablonski homes and the corruption of the police station. They come out more believable (and entertaining) than either extreme. Also, Mosley is quite a TV star in the making—charming and likable in equal measure.

"Seven Seconds" does eventually get interesting narratively, but it's not until about episode five. Something happens at the end of episode four that really injects some adrenalin into the narrative, but I kept wondering why it took so long to get there. In the old days of network television, there was a sense that shows had to rush to keep an audience for the almighty rating. I'm not saying that's the way TV should be to support a creator, but the full-season orders at Netflix may be swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction, allowing creators to meander when they could use a sense of urgency. It certainly seems to be happening with their Marvel shows, every single one of which feels bloated and sags at times, and I've noticed it in a lot of their dramas too. There's a solid, more consistent and shorter version of "Seven Seconds" within the 10-episode version premiering this week. It's up to you if you have the time to find it.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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‘Seven Seconds’: Regina King’s Brilliant Netflix Drama Is Canceled, But Still Worthy of an Emmy

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The central image in Netflix series “ Seven Seconds ” is striking, iconic and, for showrunner Veena Sud, intimately familiar: the Statue of Liberty, with her back to New Jersey, stands in front of the Manhattan shoreline. Sud saw it every day as a single mom taking her son to the park in Jersey City’s Filippino neighborhood.

“Seven Seconds” is not only a worthy successor to Sud’s Seattle mystery procedural “The Killing,” which Netflix rescued when AMC let it go, but to David Simon’s influential “The Wire,” which explored the inner workings of Baltimore institutions. She only got one season to do it, which is why Netflix put “Seven Seconds” into Emmy contention as a Limited Series. (The category is weaker than usual this year, as opposed to the overcrowded Drama Series.) In television, getting canceled is a harsher reality than not getting continued or extended; it’s a rejection, and Emmy nominations tend to come with a perception of ongoing success, not rejection.

Seven Seconds Season 1 Regina King Netflix

Nonetheless, “Seven Seconds” deserves credit as one of the best-written, -directed, and -acted series of the year. Was it ever likely to be one of the most popular? No. But Netflix was willing to take on Sud’s searing portrait of a community in which a teenage African-American boy is run off the road by a white cop (Beau Knapp) who leaves him to die in the snow in a pool of his own blood. The cop allows his fellow cops to cover up for him as a determined investigator (Michael Mosley) and assistant district attorney (British discovery Clare-Hope Ashitey) press closer to finding what actually happened.

“Netflix is open to dramas that don’t make things so easy,” said Sud. “It would have been very hard to set up at another network, if not impossible. Yes, I did get that feedback about how dark the show was when pitching. Other shows nail antlers to the corpses of women’s heads. That’s dark too.”

Seven Seconds Season 1 David Lyons, Beau Knapp Netflix

Sud adapted “Seven Seconds” from Yuriy Bykov’s “The Major,” a Russian action film about a man who hits a kid on the road, setting it in Jersey City with a Black Lives Matter storyline. “I was turning on the television and seeing on a nightly basis another shooting by a police officer by another black man — Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, Tamar Rice — ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I wanted to tell a story of police violence. I wanted not to pull any punches, to be as truthful as I can. And it was important for the story not to create false happy endings.”

The lead role, inspired by Paul Newman in “The Verdict” — a young lawyer who masks her stress with alcohol — was a bitch to cast, as it had been with “The Killing,” when Mireille Enos came in to read for the detective lead with the pilot director Patty Jenkins at the last moment. This time, with pilot director Gavin O’Connor in prep, after scores of tapes and auditions, Sud was watching “Children of Men” on TV and saw a young actress who said “fuck off” to Clive Owen. “Who is this woman?” she asked. “I needed a fighter, a woman who could show deep vulnerability and fragility and brokenness and be able to go all the way to the end of the spectrum and fight like hell.”

Ashitey pushes her troubled lawyer to the limits of likability. “I like flawed women,” said Sud. “There has to be a rebalance. There is a superwoman trope, of beauty and guts and she has it all, with her fucking hair done perfectly, she’s a good mom. She becomes a prison for us. It’s boring as shit. It makes me feel like shit about myself. In the same way Bryan Cranston and Tony Soprano got to be bad, I want women who are not that Madonna superhero beauty. I want women who act like me.”

At the center of “Seven Seconds” are the boy’s two grieving parents ( Regina King and Russell Hornsby). Always in demand, “American Crime” Emmy-winner King wanted to take on the powerhouse role of the assistant D.A., but Sud was stubborn. “I wanted Regina to play the mom because Latrice Butler and her husband are the emotional access to the story, the crux of being able to get into and understand the cost of a child’s life. We needed to understand that through the family; we needed actors who were at the top of their game. Regina and Russell are gifted and would not hold back.”

That’s what King was afraid of, she said in a phone interview. “Because I do have a son. Veena Sud saw me as Latrice. As I look back on it, the thought of that being an experience was scary. I felt, ‘How am I going to honor or pay respect to parents who have children who have been murdered at the hands of someone else?’ For a parent to lose a child is devastating in itself, but to lose a child by murder is worse.”

Working with Sud, who is Filippino-Indian, was helpful to King, she said: “Just being a woman of color in America, because of our history, the conversations she and I can have and understand from a emotional place I wouldn’t have had.”

Seven Seconds Season 1 Netflix Clare-Hope Ashitey Michael Mosley

For her writers room, Sud usually hires about eight people with a majority people of color. “My writers rooms always have women, by choice, by design,” she said. “I look for the best writers who are capable of writing the female and male leads. Some of the best voices for Fish, the white guy from Jersey, were black and Latina.”

And she also fights for as many women directors as she can. “I find there’s still resistance, as we all know, to female directors,” she said. “It remains a big problem.”

Raised in Cincinnati, Sud studied directing at NYU, moved into working on “The Real World,” wrote a spec script for “Oz” that landed her into the Disney Writing Fellowship, and joined the “Cold Case” writers room before being promoted to showrunner. “With series television, I love how long characters get to live, how many journeys they get to go through, just the ensemble nature of it.” She describes showrunning as “three rivers constantly running into the same channel: I’m writing and prepping episodes to go into production and post starts the minute the first dailies come in. When all three things are happening, I don’t get a lot of sleep or see my family much.”

She always had ambitions for “Seven Seconds” continuing to unfold like “The Wire,” “as a portrait of a city, as a reflection of the country,” she said, “using the microcosm of Jersey City as a way to play out different hot button issues that are striking our hearts.” So she is disappointed that it won’t happen.

Next up: She’s stepped away from the television village to direct a movie, “Between Earth and Sky,” a psychological thriller due this fall for Blumhouse starring Enos and Peter Sarsgaard.

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Season 1 – Seven Seconds

Where to watch, seven seconds — season 1.

Watch Seven Seconds — Season 1 with a subscription on Netflix.

What to Know

Seven Seconds is undermined by unlikable characters with somewhat predictable arcs, but its grim reflections of societal and racial division are brought to life by able performers and a fearless overall narrative.