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  • Writer's pictureKelly M. Hudson

Another Final Girl!


A group of four, cold and calculating young teen males have a pact together, a little group, where they find a blonde girl once every now and again, take her out in the woods, and hunt her. When they capture her, they kill the girl and make her disappear forever. They think they’re cute, they think they’re dangerous, and while they are both, they are also very vulnerable, and don’t even know it. Enter Veronica (Abigail Breslin), a young waif of a girl trained by a mysterious man for a very specific mission: to take this group of assholes down by playing their game. You see, she has been turned into a living weapon from years and years of training, and now she is ready to complete her first mission. She pretends to be a helpless blonde, just like all the other victims, until she can get the boys alone in the woods, where the hunters become the hunted.

This is a swift little movie that’s completely unbelievable but also a lot of fun. Breslin bites into her role with all of her teeth, embracing her character’s flaws and vulnerabilities and turning them into assets. This is a pretty physical role, and she takes to it with great glee. She is completely believable one minute as the helpless young lass caught up in the web of lies these boys have spun, and then switching it just seconds later to become the cold, killing machine she has been shaped into. Her antagonists, the boys assembled to murder who will soon become her prey, are terrific in their roles; there’s not a one of them I didn’t hate. I wanted to see their smug, rich-boy asses get handed to them, and I most certainly did. And while this movie isn’t some sort of revelation, or indeed a revolution, there are ideas to it, skimming under the surface, of rich versus poor, of how the moneyed elites see the rest of the world as playthings for their amusement, and how the true realities of life and death don’t touch the out of touch until it is far, far too late for them to change. But I don’t want to try to dive deep in waters that are fairly shallow: this is a movie about a waif of a girl killing a slate of bullies and murderers. That’s more than enough of an assessment.

Final Girl is a nice little film that doesn’t set out to change the world with its politics, but it sure does know how to entertain. And the fact that it keeps its running time short and doesn’t fall into a bunch of “I thought that guy was dead but he keeps coming back to attack more” clichés only helps to strengthen it. The movie comes to collect blood and scalps, and that’s exactly what it does, no lingering, no drawing out, just getting right to it and getting it done. I like that a lot. This was a good movie, maybe nothing special, but still wildly more entertaining that most of the dreck out there. Also, Breslin is terrific.

★★★☆


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