Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
A fictional documentary-style expose on the rivalry between two tennis stars who battled it out in a 1999 match that lasted seven days.
7 Days in Hell is a short-form HBO mockumentary that lampoons sports documentaries and tennis culture with gleeful absurdity. The satirical conceit is fun and the central performances from Andy Samberg and Kit Harington commit admirably to the bit. However, as a brief TV movie it stretches its single joke fairly thin, the cinematography is functional mockumentary pastiche with little visual ambition, and the ending deflates rather than pays off the escalating lunacy. Novelty gets a modest bump for its sharp genre parody voice, but it doesn't transcend its sketch-comedy origins.