FINAL CUT review

During the production of a low budget zombie film, the cast and crew are faced with a real, unexpected zombie outbreak that wipes them out one by one. As the camera continues to capture the action in one single unbroken take, the film's director (Romain Duris) inexplicably steers his leading actors (Matilda Lutz, Bérénice Bejo) into danger, with one simple instruction to the camera crew - whatever happens, keep filming. But in amongst the mania of the shoot, it's clear that there's more going on than meets the eye.

From Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar winning director of 2011's The Artist, Final Cut is the French language remake of the much beloved 2017 Japanese comedy-horror One Cut of the Dead. On paper, the mere existence of this film sounded like a bad idea to audiences used to seeing slick, sanitised Hollywood remakes of foreign language films. But does Final Cut - still foreign language, just a different one - have more to offer? In a way, yes - but also in a way, it offers exactly the same as the original.

Arriving with great word of mouth from its Cannes debut (where it opened the festival) and a crowd pleasing screening at this year's FrightFest, it's nigh on impossible to talk about Final Cut and its predecessor without revealing what some might consider major spoilers. In fact, the above trailer kind of gives away the whole premise of the film, if hard to piece together out of context. But, without going into detail about the intricacies of the plot, Final Cut starts with a single 30 minute long shot that works as its own film-within-the-film. From there? Well, let's just say that much like zombies did post-28 Days Later, there's a dramatic change of pace.

The most curious thing about Final Cut is how differing audience will react to the experience of watching it. If you're going in cold having not seen Shin'ichirô Ueda's original, the first half hour may be difficult to judge fairly, and may even seem amateurish and just plain bad. But to give up before the curtain is pulled back on the real story would be robbing yourself of the true joy it has to offer. A film-making puzzle that Hazanavicius has dialled-up on, even more so than the Japanese version, you have to see it through in order for it all to make sense. But there will also be a large percentage of the audience who have seen the original, attracted to this out of some morbid curiosity and needing an answer to the question of why on Earth Hazanavicius - whose work flits from the refined physical comedy of his OSS 117 films (featuring his Oscar winning lead actor for The Artist, Jean Dujardin) to weightier work like Jean-Luc Godard biography, Redoutable -would dare remake such a universally admired film?

Much like Romain Duris's character does as he inserts himself into the action of the film he's directing, acting in and taking wildly off script (don't think about it too much), Final Cut runs gamely into the danger zone of being too meta, placing a hat on top of a hat on top of a human pyramid. Playfully asking the question within the film that just because it worked in Japan it doesn't mean it'll work there, all of the major plot beats of One Cut of the Dead have survived, along with the casting of the delightfully cheery Yoshiko Takehara, reprising her role from the original. Duris does great work as Remi, the journeyman director-for-hire who refuses to cut corners and compromise his vision, even when faced with mounting production issues and a renegade cast member wielding an axe (Bérénice Bejo). He's a great facsimile for Takayuki Hamatsu in the original version, as well as serving as a thinly veiled stand-in for screenwriter/director Michel Hazanavicius himself via the touching father/daughter plot line that runs through the film, reaching a figuratively and literally uplifting moment between Remi and daughter Romy (to add to the metatextuality, played by Hazanavicius's daughter Simone) by the film's climax.

Unavoidably for fans of the original, almost of the film's surprises are nullified by their repetition, whilst also   losing some of the charm in the translation (sadly, "Pom!" didn't make the cut), but Final Cut still works as a curio and love letter to the filmmaking process that will work for audiences keen to see how the film's meta premise survives when passed through the (albeit unconventional) remake machine. For newcomers, as plot A from Hazanavicius's film spills over into plot B and turns into a mega-meta-zombie mash-up, there's enough gore and gung ho spirit to make Final Cut well worth your time.

Verdict

3/5

Signature Entertainment presents Final Cut on Digital Platforms 7th November

A Brief But Thought Provoking Explanation For My Prolonged Absence From The Internet

Hello.

As many of my loyal readers out there keep stopping me on the street to mention to me, it's been a while since I updated Slacker Cinema. To be honest, I'd go further and say that it's been a hell of a while since I posted anything of real merit at all. The life of a film blogger can be a cruel one, and I'm pretty sure we all go through this stage at some point, where the process of maintaining a blog becomes a bit of a chore rather than something that is done out of love for films. Well, I decided to give myself a little break to recharge my batteries. Did I mean for it to go on this long? No, I planned on giving myself a week off and it has turned into nearly two months.

A hiatus, a sabbatical, laziness. Call it what you will, but for while the thought of sitting down in front of the computer and actually writing something filled me with dread. Maybe I was spinning too many plates (metaphorically), burning the candle at both ends (metaphorically) and juggling too many balls (ahem), but I decided to give my keyboard a much deserved rest.

"So what have you been doing" I hear you not ask? For those who don't know, I "technically" work in the film industry, albeit on a rung pretty close to the bottom of the ladder. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure I'm doing the job I always wanted to do and I'm quite proud of what I've managed to achieve with a film degree that could be best described as a C- and a CV hampered by a five year stint at a possibly, probably soon-to-be-defunct DVD rental store. I'm just a long way from Hollywood is what I'm saying. Well, that job takes up a hell of a lot of my time, making sure people get to see the films they want to see (whilst I stand nearby and get to see very little myself) and I suppose something had to give, at least for a while. In the last two months I don't think I've been watching less films, per se (at least not on DVD; and I've recently been taking advantage of the obscurity mecca that is Netflix), and I have always been a diligent note taker when I think a film is worth writing about, but I've shied away from sitting down and formulating those notes into what I dare to call "reviews".

Anyway, what's the point in having a film blog if you don't make use of the cathartic pleasure of writing about random oddities, forgotten gems and (yeah, why not) the new big blockbuster stuff that everyone else is also writing about? Looking to the future I'm hoping to update this site with a lot more regular content including one or two blog projects that I'm kind of excited about starting (wait 'til you hear about my Dan Aykroyd fanboy project. You'll be wishing you'd thought of it first), continuing to tell you what to spend your money on with my weekly DVD round-up, hopefully visiting one or two film festivals that are coming up and also sorting out the way the site looks, once and for all.

But hey, whatever, I'm back now and I'm going to do what I do best. Watch and write about some shitty movies so that you don't have to. Unbelievably, I'm heading towards my third anniversary of writing Slacker Cinema in my increasingly sporadic ways, so I suppose I want to say thank you to those who bother to take time to read it, and I promise to put a bit more effort into making sure there's something new up quite regularly. Or maybe not. We'll see.

The clue is in the name, I suppose.