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Final

2001, Movie, NR, 100 mins

Final: Review

FINAL
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Rod Serling would have boiled it down to a taut, 30-minute Twilight Zone episode; the Wachowski brothers might have pumped it up into an effects-laden, sci-fi spectacle. Actor-turned-director Campbell Scott handles this enigmatic science fiction mystery with such gloomy restraint that it barely moves. That said, it never panders to audience expectations and is exceptionally well acted. Bill Tyler (Denis Leary) awakens in a barely furnished room, in what appears to be some sort of hospital. He's disoriented, highly paranoid and prone to violent mood swings, but has no memory of what has happened, nor does he have any recollection of ever meeting his primary physician, a young psychiatric doctor named Ann Johnson (Hope Davis). Ann tells him he was found unconscious over a week ago in a stone quarry, and has been in a coma ever since; he's now recovering at the Sumner Hospital outside Hartford as a ward of the state of Connecticut. Bill, however, thinks she's lying and has concocted a slightly different version of events. Bill insists that 500 years earlier he was cryogenically frozen by scientists and has only now been revived; within the next 24 hours, he believes, he'll been given a final, fatal injection so his organs can be harvested for some dark purpose. Ann tries to convince him that he's suffering from delusions brought on by some traumatic event, and attempts to piece together from the memory fragments swirling through Bill's rattled head an accurate account of what transpired in the hours leading up to his accident. As the memories start to cohere and Bill begins reliving the guilt and grief surrounding his father's death and his breakup with his fiancée, the already complicated relationship between doctor and patient deepens. Shot on a mini digital video camcorder and blown up to 35mm film, the film has the muddy, low-resolution quality of many DV features; it suits the institutional milieu but further drabs down an already glum, slow-moving feature. It's obvious from the start that things will eventually go one way or another, and the interim seems unnecessarily attenuated. Davis, however, is well cast and Leary is excellent, something which should come as no surprise to anyone who caught the former stand-up comic's turn in JESUS' SON. Contemporary blues great Guy Davis contributes several songs to the soundtrack and makes a brief appearance in one of Bill's many flashbacks. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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