I’d like to think of “The Final Cut” as “Memento”-lite. It’s a film based on the basic premise of “Memento” and “Minority Report” about a quasi-future society based on a completely boring plot device. After watching this, I thought to myself “That’s why this didn’t experience wide distribution”. Even with Robin Williams playing it low with another conflicted and mellow performance, “The Final Cut” never lives up to anything it promises. I was never sure what in god’s name the writer was even trying to explain to the audience with the rambling concept and story.
Williams’ job as a man who peruses through a lifetime of video from a chip implanted in to these people’s heads is never as insightful or thought-provoking as it could be, and watching Williams emote while looping video is not as dramatic as the director thinks. If that’s not enough, the home videos he chronicles are so ingenuous. People spout cheesy dialogue to make it look sentimental, and just to feel as if we’re watching something more than a simple melodrama, everyone speaks in low whispers, and I slowly fall asleep. Williams continues playing the same character he did in “Insomnia” and his character, along with Jim Caviezel’s, is very unlikable.
“The Final Cut” is sadly a semi sci-fi thriller that also attempts to be a murder mystery and a rather limp one at that. And when Sorvino whose character is even more boring and one-dimensional enters the film, things manage to slow down even more. The relationship between Sorvino and Williams is extremely forced, and never adds nothing to the film except arbitrary drama and excessive padding that adds up to nothing but a rather cheap plot twist. “The Final Cut” is limp, and quite a challenge to sit through. Robin Williams plays the same sad and mopey character he did in “Insomnia” and “One Hour Photo”, Jim Caviezel’s talents are wasted, and Sorvino really has no reason to be here. “The Final Cut” is a sleepy, boring, and utterly forgettable thriller that should rightly remain forgotten.
You know I don’t get you. Sometimes you can make some pretty good reviews and can be spot on, then other times not so much. That is ok we are all different when it comes to movies but this one I must disagree with you. I think that it brings out many different thoughts on whether or not this is something one would want to do which is intriguing. Wouldn’t you as a parent or sister, brother or a loved one want to be able to see those memories, or even after they pass would you or would you not want to see what they were really all about if you could? Say you had these intuitions that your spouse just wasn’t what they seemed to be but yet you couldn’t prove it and here you could see what they were really all about? But on the other hand if you were wanting to see the memories again of those special times right in front of you, that would be awesome as well. This is a very grey area with many intriguing questions that this movie provides, along with the ending of solving a memory gone wrong and fixing it in your mind. We all know that as kids we can remember things that really didn’t happen the way you thought they did and this alone can fix that as this movie showed. So I do find this movie intriguing and much better than you think.. That is just me though.