Final Girl

In an unnamed town, a group of four teenage boys are hiding a dark secret. Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the four boys persuade young blond women to join them out in the woods, before springing a “game” on them, said “game” being chasing the innocent lady through the forest and hunting her for sport. The group thinks they have a good thing going, having already taken out 20 young women without even the hint of suspicion. They’ve even got their sights set on their next target: Veronica, the cute, doe-eyed new girl in town. But after their inexplicable string of unimpeded good luck, the boys are about to be in for a bit of a shock. Because Veronica isn’t your typical teen. Turns out, for the last 12 years, Veronica has been training to be an assassin of sorts, and it just so happens that her final test involves taking all four of their murderous hides to the cleaners.

Final Girl is an American horror/thriller from 2015 starring Alexander Ludwig (AKA: that one young guy from the Hunger Games films), Wes Bently (AKA: that one sleazy guy from American Horror Story and Yellowstone) and Abigail Breslin (AKA: that cute kid who was in Little Miss Sunshine.) With the inclusion of the angle involving a young hit-girl and her handler, and all the brutal murdering happening out in the dark woods, the movie kind of feels like it’s trying to be some kind of odd combination of Leon: The Professional and an 80’s slasher. Which, cool, that actually sounds like fun. Emphasis though on trying, because while I do like a lot of the ideas and the direction I think the film was going for, the movie never quite feels like any of its concepts were fully realized.

Don’t ask. It’s never explained.

Though that’s not to say that I think the film is in any way bad. It’s actually very watchable and even pretty entertaining in parts. It just…. Doesn’t wholly feel like it’s a complete film much of the time. More like a rough draft with several pieces missing. While the base plot of an assassin swooping into town to right some kind of evil by brutally killing a bunch of bored, rich, entitled white boys is totally a concept I can get behind, that’s about as deep as the plotting ideas seem to go. Nothing beyond those base notions ever gets fleshed out to the point where they need to be, and it feels like the filmmakers never thought through more than, say, 60% of their concepts before putting the story to film. Meaning you’re going to end up walking away with a lot of questions. For instance, we’re told right off the bat that Veronica’s parents are dead, and she’s being taken in at a young age by this nameless man, whom we’re brought to believe is some sort of assassin, and he then supposedly spends 12 years training her how to kill. Except the film does not back up these assertions at all. We get these brief flashbacks where Assassin Man is teaching her things and detailing her about the case, and half the time they’re doing this all I could think of was, “…if you’ve been training her for 12-years, shouldn’t she already know how to do all this crap?” It’s like he’s just teaching her, right at that very moment, how to do basic things like put people into a headlock. Doesn’t it seem a bit late in the game to be getting to that skill? Shouldn’t she have, I don’t know, perfected that particular skill by now? And, you know, I’m aware that this was a cheap, independent film, but they could have at least sprung a bit extra to hire a trainer for an hour so they could teach Breslin how to throw a proper punch. Because you know what, bless that girl, she’s cute and she’s trying, but I ain’t buying her as some kind of lethal weapon.

Quick! Stop her before she hugs him to death!

And that’s just the training bit. We haven’t even gotten to the absurdity of the boys wearing their little tuxedos, or the fighting part out in the woods, which leaves me with even more questions. Like, okay, Assassin Man takes her out in the woods days earlier to show her the area she’ll be fighting in, making it clear this entire situation has previously been planned and scouted out. So then, they went around and stashed some weapons in strategic locations, right? WRONG. No stashed weapons. No gun on her. No knife hidden in a sock. Nada. Despite the weapons training we see her do, she’s meant to beat up these losers with nothing but a spiked flask, apparently. And when she does manage to disarm one of the boys of their own weapon and dispatches them with it, do you think she keeps said weapon? Hell no. She leaves it there and moves on to go rabbit punch the next guy. I feel like there are just so many other options available to her that she just deliberately ignores, and it’s almost infuriating watching her do it. And that’s not even touching on the question of why they’re going through this convoluted setup in the first place. Wouldn’t it have been much easier to just off these idiots in their own homes, one at a time? Why did she have to play the victim when they already knew who they were and where they’d be? I can’t tell if whatever secret killing society they’re part of has some kind of penchant for drama, a bizarre moral code that only allows you to drug your targets before you kill them (but then there goes any kind ‘fair fight’ theory), or if Assassin Man is just really, really crappy at his fragging job.

Oh, sure. She gets nothing, but HE gets a big-ass gun. Because OF COURSE he does.

But other than the innumerable questions I have regarding just about every other plot point of this film, the rest of the movie is actually pretty good. The acting is decent, if not occasionally cheesy at some points. The fight choreography is pretty good, considering it doesn’t really look like anyone actually knows how to fight. It sounds good, and it looks GREAT. Like, there’s some really nicely framed shots in this film, some lovely use of color and atmosphere, and even a couple of instances where it gets a little artsy-fartsy. So regardless of everything else, the movie looks shockingly good and is very technically well made. But while it’s fun and looks good it still never quite feels complete. It’s the kind of film that could have benefited from some script streamlining or even an additional 20-minutes. If for no other reason than to know how the weird assassin guild (or whatever) works, or how in the world those four buffoons could meet up with 20 girls, in public, with witnesses, at the same location, wearing the same outfits, only to then have the ladies immediately go missing, and no one notice, let along become suspicious of them. Like, seriously Final Girl, you’re a quick, fun watch, and I like you, but I still have many, many questions regarding what the hell was going on during half of that plot, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Final Girl is available on a variety of streaming services.

Final Girl is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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