French Horror-Comedy Remake Regurgitates Clever Concept with Fast-Zombie Energy
DIRECTED BY MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS/FRENCH/2022
BLU-RAY STREET DATE: SEPTEMBER 12, 2023/KINO LORBER
“Fast, cheap, or decent- pick two, you can’t have all three.” It’s an edict that most every Creative-For-Hire has to, at one time or another (probably multiple times) administer. All too often, it’s hard to make clients understand this universal truth, affirming that good work takes time– but time is also money. This dense, entitled individual is the client creatives hate. But there’s something they hate even more: The Over-Promising Ceative. The creative who deludes themself and the client into believing that the job can in fact come in fast, cheap, and decent. Rémi, the lead character of Michel Hazanavicius’ propulsive zombie comedy Final Cut, is one such creative.
At its heart, Final Cut is a love letter to seat-of-the-pants filmmaking. By pedigree, it’s a questionable remake of a major Japanese hit, 2017’s One Cut of the Dead. As written and directed by Shin’ichirō Ueda, the micro-scaled One Cut of the Dead turned industry heads when it proceeded to earn over 1,000 times its budget. So of course there was going to be an immediate remake. In this case, however, it’s not the usual English language horror remake. This time, the French got to it first.
Hazanavicius, exhausting what’s probably the last shred of his Oscar boost (courtesy of his 2011 Best Picture and Best Director winner, The Artist), Final Cut goes all in on blood splatting and violent craziness. However, being far more of a plain ‘ol comedy than even a horror-comedy, such genre flourishes never land as truly shocking. Whether Hazanavicius has a straightforward horror in him or not remains to be seen, as this is really not it. Which is fine, really. The question then becomes, is it funny? Your milage will vary, though for me, it yields chuckles at best.
Here, Hazanavicius is far more determined to rack up acknowledgment of how clever everything is moreso than laughs, gasps, or screams. Without yet having seen One Cut of the Dead (which feels like more of a prerequisite than it ought to), it’s impossible to say to what degree Final Cut is a remake versus a knowing riff. The twenty-minute making-of documentary, anchored by a very forthright Hazanavicius, is a good watch but failed to provide that clarification.
One cleverness that everyone loves is how the diminutive Japanese actress Yoshiko Takehara essentially reprises her One Cut role for Final Cut. Like One Cut (so I gather), Final Cut plays out in three distinct chunks. First, there’s the horrific story of a film crew trying to finish production of a low-budget zombie movie when a real zombie outbreak occurs on set. This sequence plays out in bravura style as one long perfectly orchestrated unbroken Steadicam shot.
Then, there’s the backstory of the production. In this extended (and somewhat speed-bumpy) middle portion, we learn that the film-within-the-film is indeed a remake of a phenomenally successful Japanese film (meta!), and that its director, Rémi (Romain Duris), must navigate a bunch of weird mandates of the original’s rights holders (for example, the Japanese character names must remain, even though it’s a French film) in order to go forward with production.
Meanwhile, Rémi’s homelife is bumpy as his wife and grown daughter (Hazanavicius’ real wife, Bérénice Bejo, and Matilda Lutz, respectively) are also involved in the production, and therefore sharing full time in the stress. Will the film’s chaotic production (depicted in the third portion of Final Cut) somehow bring them closer… or devour their family dynamic once and for all?
The Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Final Cut gets the job done in modest fashion, providing a good transfer of the movie and the previously mentioned making-of doc. Also, there’s a theatrical trailer. And that’s it. Released to mixed results in 2022, I suspect that many individual opinions about it are rooted in earlier opinions of One Cut of the Dead. For me, still uncertain if Hazanavicius reanimated One Cut or simply came staggering after it (or some mixture of both?), I can only confidently assert that Final Cut lands in terms of its effectively affecting cast and impressive scene orchestrations. To what degree it’s oh-so-flaunted cleverness- its fast-cheap-and-decent quotient- makes the cut, I’ll leave to the more loyal clientele.