‘Final Cut’ Review: A Feeble Rise of the Living Dead

If you’re going to remake a movie whose footprint remains to be contemporary, you higher make it your personal if not considerably higher. The French zom-com “Final Cut” does neither — the veteran filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius (“The Artist”) might have an Oscar, however his uninspired riff on the Japanese film “One Cut of the Dead” (2019) has obtained nothing on the unique’s ultra-low-budget charms.

In “One Cut of the Dead,” a crew capturing a B-level zombie flick is attacked by the undead in a shaky single-take sequence that works regardless of its inexplicable pauses and blatantly phony severed limbs. We step into the making of the film-within-the-film, monitoring the shoot from a chaotic behind-the-scenes perspective. The first half is enjoyable, however the second half is golden, mining absurd humor, breathless pressure, and movie-magic triumphalism from an onslaught of minor crises.

Hazanavicius’s adaptation is an nearly beat-for-beat copy: there’s an ax-wielding make-up artist performed by an actress (Bérénice Bejo) who goes frighteningly Method; a blood-splatterd “final girl” (Matilda Lutz) who lobs off the top of her lover (Finnegan Oldfield); some all-too-realistic sensible results courtesy of a drunken, vomit-spewing castmate and one other participant seized by a bout of explosive diarrhea.

Some tweaks account for Hazanavicius’s French translation, probably the most intriguing of which additional deepen the plot’s metacinematic layers. “One Cut” exists inside this world, too, with a Japanese cohort representing that movie’s rights holders looming over the director Rémi (Romain Duris). There’s a protracted, fascinating historical past of Japanese and French cultural cross-pollination — and each international locations are house to 2 of the oldest, most strong movie industries on the planet — however Hazanavicius works within the globalization of moviemaking solely superficially, primarily by way of lazy culture-clash mockery: a Pearl Harbor joke right here, a jab on the stereotypically poor French work ethic there.

“Final Cut” places its predecessor’s components by way of an unflattering Instagram filter. The shoot’s intentional shoddiness — authentically kitschy within the authentic — rings false, with Hazanavicius spelling out the crew’s missteps in such a means that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.

In France, to make a movie concerning the making-of-a-film is virtually a ceremony of passage (see François Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” or “Olivier Assayas’s “Irma Vep”). With its metafictional bounties and playful style bent, “One Cut” gives a conceit ripe for the choosing. But what Hazanavicius has completed here’s a lifeless mock-up, a rehash made purely for audiences who’d favor to not learn Japanese subtitles. At least that’s some form of justification for its existence.

Final Cut
Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters.