FINAL CUT - Mark Reviews Movies

Final Cut, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 13, 2023

It's best not to know too much about Final Cut before watching it. Unfortunately, that was also the case with One Cut of the Dead, the Japanese film upon which this French movie is based. So much of the success of that film was in its ability to surprise, as its layered story about a film crew, making a low-budget movie about zombies, being attacked by actual zombies gradually revealed additional, unexpected layers.

The joke, in other words, has already been told before writer/director Michel Hazanavicius even gets to the setup of his own version of the gag. Can it work again? In theory, it certainly could, but the screenplay here doesn't do nearly enough to separate this new version from its source material. The idea of the story here, particularly in the way it throws back one curtain on the action in order to reveal another, remains strong, to be sure, and while the general wisdom is that it's a terrible idea to mess around with a good thing, a little bit of variation might have gone a long way in this case.

For newcomers to the general conceit of this tale, this review will offer some advance warning before discussing any particulars of what happens after the first act, because the element of surprise is so vital to how the story's trick works. Then again, anyone who is unaware of the story should seek out the original film first anyway, if only because it performs the trick much better. Plus, there are enough references to the Japanese film that Hazanavicius' effort is almost akin to an unofficial sequel.

Some degree of discussion about the rest of the story is necessary, though, because a lot of what doesn't work here—or doesn't work nearly as well as in the first film—comes down to the way this movie sets up the gimmick and pays it off, as well this movie's awareness of itself as a remake. Hazanavicius certainly deserves some credit for acknowledging that he's treading familiar ground, but it's too bad the filmmaker doesn't do more with that idea than an acknowledgement and, in a way, giving away the game for newcomers a bit too early.

Anyway, the first section of the story—all of it captured in a one-take—revolves around the production of a zombie movie, set in a remote, abandoned location and populated by a slightly eclectic group of actors and crewmembers. The movie's director, played by a Frenchman but having the distinctly Japanese name Hirgurashi (Romain Duris), is at the end of his rope with his leading actors. They're Ken (Finnegan Oldfield) and Chinatsu (Matilda Lutz), who are also not Japanese. The director doesn't think his actors are offering convincing performances for the climax of his movie, so he takes extreme measures to guarantee some realism for the camera.

Basically, Hirgurashi unleashes the undead on the large complex in the middle of a forest preserve. Bang, Chinatsu, and makeup artist Natsumi (Bérénice Bejo) have to avoid and fight zombies, some of them infected crewmembers, while Hirgurashi tries to use the situation he created to finish shooting the movie.

As in the original, there are certain hints that something—beyond the zombies, of course—isn't quite right about the production, but unlike the source material, there's little that's subtle about those hints. If the movie-within-the-movie is meant to be a bad one, Hazanavicius takes it too far and lets us know that a lot more is wrong with what we're watching than just a couple of actors being unable to emote.

Here, the gag must be revealed. Newcomers to the material are free to leave this review and return later—hopefully after watching the original film.

Anyway, the movie-within-the-movie, as you already know now, is actually the entire first act. "Hirgurashi" is actually struggling filmmaker Rémi, who has accepted the job of remaking a live television special from Japan about a zombie attack on the set of a zombie movie. The story then becomes watching as the production of the live TV broadcast becomes cursed in a variety of non-supernatural ways, until the point that the filming is a disaster in the making.

The big problem, perhaps, is that Hazanavicius telegraphs the behind-the-scenes disaster too much and too often in the opening section, giving us obviously missed cues, actors appearing visibly lost, music cues cutting out in the middle of action, and various people breaking the fourth wall in desperation. A significant part of the fun of the original is how these real characters manage to pull off something that's mostly convincing, in spite of the troublesome shoot. In this one, the joke is that the end result is an obvious mess that everyone and anyone can see, meaning the over-the-top humor and frantic staging of the third act isn't so much a punch line as it is a technical explanation.

It doesn't help that the best jokes remain the same and that the new ones (the size of the filming location) add senseless complications to matters. The cast makes a valiant effort, though, while the structure and gimmick of the story are still too clever to deny. Mainly, Final Cut serves as a reminder of how successful its source was, which isn't a benefit.

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