Review: Final Girl

Official Tagline: A man teaches a young woman how to become a complete weapon. 13 years later, at 18 she will approach a group of sadistic teens who killed blonde women for unknown reasons. The hunting season begins.

Written by: Adam Prince

Directed by: Tyler Shields 

Starring: Abigail Breslin, Wes Bentley, Alexander Ludwig

I have been looking forward to seeing Final Girl after catching a trailer for the film about six months ago. The idea of a young girl trained to hunt and kill serial killers sounded intriguing. Plus the film stars Abigail Breslin, who always seems to deliver a good performance, so I was happy to finally watch Final Girl last night.

The title Final Girl refers to the horror movie trope where the last female victim in a horror movie usually defeats the monster and is the Final Girl. So with that idea in place, writer Adam Prince and director Tyler Shields create the story of Veronica [Abigail Breslin], who after her parents are murdered, is recruited by a mysterious man [Wes Bentley] and trained to hunt and kill human predators. 

Director Shields was going for a stylized look and feel to the film, almost a Sin City feel, where the characters are “bigger than life.The story takes place mainly at night and judging by the clothing and automobiles, in an ambiguous 1950’s feeling time period. The movie is uneven in many places. I think the creators were trying to walk the line between thriller and comedy, but should have stuck with just one genre. 

A thriller lives and dies by suspense and Shields manages to lose the sense of suspense in almost every scene. When I say comedy, it may not have been intentional and only came in from the over acting of many of the supporting cast, but the staging of the scenes seem to suggest that they were going for humor in many scenes.

Abigail Breslin always gives a good performance and is good Final Girl, except in the action scenes. I think the production should have spent a little money training her for fight scenes, because her character is supposed to have been trained for thirteen years to fight and kill, but in the scenes where miss Breslin is fighting her attackers, she seems like she barely knows how to throw a punch. Wes Bentley does his usual solid performances playing creepy Wes Bentley and Alexander Ludwig isn’t bad being the arrogant, rich pretty boy psychopathic leader of the hipster serial killers.

Final Girl isn’t a bad movie, but it could have been a much better movie if the writer and director had strived to give the film a real sense of danger and suspense. Merging horror and comedy is attempted by many film makers with mixed results and I think the movie would have been better served if it had been a straight horror film. 

Final Girl is worth a look if you like your horror mixed with humor, intended or not.

 Screen Writer Ink

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