Final - 2001
Posted on January 9, 2008 at 10:20 pm by Administrator
OK, so I’m gonna admit right up front, I had about five beers and a couple of margaritas in me, and it was about one thirty in the morning before I finally sat down to watch Final one night. I think I DVR’ed it from the Independent Film Channel if I remember right. It’s possible that I don’t because of the beers and margaritas, but if you’ve been reading much of this blog, you probably already know I’m full of shit, so no point pretending I’m informed now.
Occasionally I take notes while I’m watching movies so I can refer to them later when I blog it. Here’s what I wrote for Final:
I don’t know if I can buy Denis Leary in this type of role.
What the hell is going on in this movie?
What the fuck?? Is that Jim Gaffigan?
Is something going to happen soon?
This is a science fiction movie without special effects!
After that my writing trails off on the page and ends in a stain that can only be the drool from where I fell asleep at about three am.
Here’s the deal. Final is one of those concepts that was borne out of a love for science fiction, minus the money to do it properly. Final is as low-budget as they come. Denis Leary is Bill, a man who wakes up in something that’s not quite a prison, but a little more than a hospital. We do not know exactly what Bill’s malady is, but we are treated to flashbacks from his life where he appears to be going through a very tough time. He’s the outcast of his family, he’s broken up with his fiancee, his father has died, and eventually he flashes back to his own apparent attempted suicide.
His therapist Ann (Hope Davis) is in charge of deciding whether he’s “recovering” or not. She begins work figuring out why he has delusions of being cryogenically frozen for four hundred years, and why he believes he will soon be executed. Just as you’re about to go, “OK, what the fuck??” and hit the stop button on the DVR, the story unfurls itself all at once and you find out that Bill hasn’t been frozen for four hundred years, but he is going to die soon.
The pacing in Final is terrible. Nothing seems to happen for the first half of the movie, then they reveal, like, ten plot points all at once, then there’s a long slow slide to the end. It’s like Denis Leary said “I’ve been frozen for four hundred years” and the doctors said “No you haven’t. Seriously.” Then as the movie viewer, you go “OK, whew. Cuz that would have been weird.” Then the Doctors say, “Instead you’ve been in a coma, your mom died, your girlfriend abandoned you to a science experiment and got remarried, we froze you, there was a terrible epidemic that ravaged the world, now we woke you up, but we have to kill you so we can save the world with your tissue cells because you were frozen before the pandemic burned into the human genome.” And all of that is revealed in less than five minutes. Nothing else happens. And the entire movie (except the brief flashbacks) happens in the hospital. Jim Gaffigan plays a hospital orderlie who hardly ever speaks.
But then maybe I was just drunk.
** Two Stars
