Released in 2017, Shinichiro Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead, was a very low-budget riff on zombie cinema that made up for what it lacked in financial backing with a lot of genuine inspiration and the result ended up becoming both substantial international success with critics and audiences and an instant cult favorite among genre fans. Now that film has been remade by no less of a figure than Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning director of the silent film homage/pastiche The Artist, that pretty much follows its predecessor almost beat for beat throughout. In theory, a film like this should come across as largely pointless—who wants to hear someone retell the same joke that you have already heard done pretty well?—but Final Cut is executed in such a cheerfully goofball manner that I still found myself laughing at it despite having already experienced the original. Those who never got around to seeing it the first time around may well enjoy it even more, though I would suggest that those who haven’t seen the original should put this review aside so as to preserve what will presumably come as surprises to them.
At first, it appears that we are watching a small group of people who have gathered at an abandoned building with an apparently unsavory wartime past in order to shoot an extremely low-budget zombie movie. Unfortunately for them, the director (Romain Duris), in a misguided attempt to bring an extra level of intensity to the proceedings, has secretly invoked a curse that has the power to unleash actual zombies among the cast and crew while he continues to film the ensuing mayhem. This is all well and good but keen-eyed viewers able to look beyond the gallons of blood that is spilled along the way will notice that a number of things on display are just plain odd, ranging from a number of weird seeming flubs and digressions—such as the makeup woman (Berenice Bejo) taking several minutes to tell the two co-stars about her fascination with Krav Maga—to the bizarre fact that everyone that we see appears to have a Japanese name despite none of them actually being Japanese. Oh, to make things even more disconcerting, everything that we see appears to have been one in one continuous shot.
After about 30 minutes or so of this, Final Cut begins to lay its cards on the table by revealing that what we have been watching is a short one-take zombie film—a remake of a Japanese project about the cast and crew of a zombie film who find themselves under attack from real zombies—that has been produced live as the splashy introduction to a new horror website. The film then takes us back a month early as struggling filmmaker Remi (Duris) is brought on to stage this micro-budget exercise and the various absurdities that he is forced to confront along the way, such as the insistence of the producers that he stick exactly to the original script, right down to the character names, the gastrointestinal peculiarities of a couple of crew members that kick in at the worst possible time and a twist of fate that finds two of the lead actors replaced at the last second by himself and his wife (Bejo), a former actress who left the limelight when it became apparent that she was getting way too emotionally and physically involved in her roles. For the last third of the film, we see the film again, only this time from a behind-the-scenes perspective that shows everything going haywire and explains the earlier moments of weirdness as the attempts by all concerned to keep things going until the tricky all-important final shot, one requiring a crane that is no longer operable.
Although some unsuspecting viewers may go into Final Cut thinking it to be a spoof of zombie movies along the lines of Return of the Living Dead or Shaun of the Dead, that is not really what the film has on its mind after all. At its heart, this is basically another tale of a bunch of oddballs who get together to put on a show that begins spiraling out of control as they perform it, only to somehow triumph in the end—sort of like Noises Off or My Favorite Year, albeit with a lot more fake blood and not-so-fake vomit on hand. Considering that practically all of Hazanavicius’s films have been love letters to the cinema (besides The Artist, there have been the spy thriller goof OSS 117 and the ghastly Nouvelle Vague meditation Godard Mon Amour), he is not exactly trying, despite the amount of faux gore on display, to draw blood with his satirical observations here. Although there is hardly an aspect of the low-budget filmmaking experience that doesn’t get a poke here, the comedy is more affectionate than anything else and gives viewers a genuine rooting interest in seeing the film come off in the last segment despite the fact that we already know how it turns out from seeing the opening section.
I suppose that there is no real reason for Final Cut to exist and although some of the meta-movie aspects about making a movie about a seemingly unnecessary French remake of a Japanese film that is itself a seemingly unnecessary French remake of a Japanese film are intriguing, I would have to agree that the original version is the better one. That said, while there may not be any real reason for the film to exist, it still has its charms—a number of the behind-the-scenes jokes are very funny, it manages to sustain its breakneck pace for most of the running time and the performances are good, especially the funny turns from Bejo and Simone Hazanavicius, MIchel’s real-life daughter, who plays—who else?—Remi’s daughter, who has cinematic ambitions of her own that end up coming into play as well. Granted, the meta-movie angle may grate on some viewers and those not already sold on Hazanavicius’s brand of cinematic whimsy will not find much here that would change their opinions of him. That said, Final Cut is ultimately a endearingly silly love letter to the cinema that has a lot of laughs and no small amount of heart—not to mention some other body parts as well.