Pedigree action thriller that somehow ends up with less than its parts.
It grabs your attention while playing cool with it; no matter how authentic it makes itself out to be, it's just a bit silly. From these movies you expect a certain amount of cynicism and controversy, sometimes some existential strangeness, but The Seven-Ups plays it so safe as to be strangely dull.
Events lack plausibility and the case comes together purely by chance (mispouring a coffee means they miss the abduction of an undercover agent whose wire is on the blink just as he's discovered, the same agent who goes undercover as a mob driver, because you can just walk into those jobs through a temp agency presumably, they stage a slapstick routine to break a counterfeit ring, knowing that the crime would place the goods in a glass cabinet) making it more like Lethal Weapon 3 than the French Connection. At least Riggs and Murtaugh we're past playing it straight by then.
Certainly it has an authentic car chase with authentic children playing in the middle of a authentic busy street to add to the authentic peril, and an authentic road block with 2 police cars with an authentic looking 3 foot gap between them. Presumably more dangerous than the guys delivering the plate of glass or some authentic looking cardboard boxes stacked neatly in the way.
In fact it all starts to resemble a TV Pilot that got a cinema release with authentic bouts of violence.
The denouement even gets muddled as it seems unaware of its silliness.
Roy Scheider is excellent as is Richard Lynch but everything else is cliche nonsense. Authentic cliche nonsense.
Review of The Seven-Ups
