The Final Cut

Director: Omar Naim
Starring: Robin Williams, Mira Sorvino, Jim Caviezel...
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Rating:


by Tom Working

Not to be confused with In The Cut, in which a New York writing professor has an erotic affair (is there any other kind?) with a police officer, The Final Cut is the latest Robin Williams offering, in which he has an erotic affair with dead peoples' memories.

The film is a Philip K. Dickish tale of a not-so-distant future in which people are implanted at birth with memory recorders - you see and hear what the person sees and hears throughout their lifetime. The key function of this voyeuristic tech is to provide fodder for a posthumous retrospective documentary for a funeral.

The reality is... a lot of dark human stuff requires editing out, like a prominent public figure having his penchant for the prepubescent being excised from his retrospective.

Mira Sorvino, James Caviezel and especially Robin Williams do nothing extraordinary in this potentially intriguing concept of a film. A lot of the meatier psychology and controversy within the plot feels contrived and the world in which this technology rests isn't fleshed out.

One of the first thoughts I had while watching it was how there'd probably be a black market for peoples' memories, like rapes, molestations, suicides, or just basic stuff that people wouldn't or -- in the case of bed-confined folk -- couldn't do, like sky diving or deep sea diving. Seeing aspects of living through another's eyes. That would be an enticing drug. They didn't really go into that angle. Strange Days did it and this film could've taken that angle up a few degrees. But it didn't.

Like all those life moments on the cutting room floor, this film was missable.