You don’t have to have seen a single game of tennis to enjoy this mockumentary about the longest match that (n)ever took place in the sport’s history. Andy Samberg plays Aaron Williams, the mullet-sporting adopted brother of Serena and Venus (whose family “reverse Blind-Sided” him) made immortal by his record-smashing, week-long battle with posh, dim-witted English prodigy Charles Poole (Kit Harington) at Wimbledon. Things only get more riotously ridiculous from the premise: the team behind sports spoof Tour de Pharmacy chronicle the winding journeys the rivals took to that climactic seven-day showdown, from forays into the world of innovative underwear design to stints in Swedish jails, by way of a surreal tangent into the storied faux-history of courtroom sketch art. Suffice it to say: the tennis isn’t really the point here.
Real-life figures from the sport (including Serena Williams and John McEnroe) ground the spoof in enough reality to make the zany humor pop, with the comedy coming from a very game Fred Armisen, Michael Sheen, Lena Dunham, Will Forte, and Howie Mandel. With eccentric humor in spades — from the puerile to the surreal — and a lean runtime, 7 Days in Hell packs in as many dizzying jokes as Aaron and Charles do volleys in their absurd history-making rally.
"Weirdly, in a cast of comedy greats like the above, Harington is the stand-out."
— Liz Shannon Miller
"Far from perfect but pretty good is HBO's 7 Days in Hell, a true oddity that knows to end just when it's about to get annoying."
— Brian Tallerico
A fictional documentary-style expose on the rivalry between two tennis stars who battled it out in a 1999 match that lasted seven days.
The incredible story behind the longest match in (fictional) tennis history.
While the bulk of the cast were no stranger to comedy when this was made, Harington — then known as Game of Thrones’ very dour Jon Snow — stands out as an odd pick for something like this (even if, like Jon, Charles knows nothing). As the doltish tennis star, though, he proves himself a very able and willing butt of the joke, qualities that shine in the movie’s hilarious credits sequence, which has since been much-memed for posterity.
A good movie to watch? Indubitably.
