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Final (2001)

Rate: 7
Viewed: 5/20

Final
5/20: Calling all fans of Denis Leary, they are in for a treat, and it's called Final although a great deal of patience is required.

At first, I thought the appropriate title should've been Get Me the Hell Out of the Room with Hillary Clinton! The longer the movie went on, the more my questions weren't answered. Finally, the last twenty minutes began to clear up everything, boosting my rating from '5' to '7'.

That being said, I'll have to see Final again later. There's no doubt the whole thing is totally on Denis Leary's and Hope Davis' backs. Both give excellent performances and should've been Oscar-nominated; one is drily funny while the other is emotionally restrained because of the seriousness of the situation. Their acting carries the film through for two hours without boring me which isn't an easy thing to do. Of course, there's something special about Denis Leary.

If there's a negative, it's just that Final is too long. My patience was tested from time to time. Therefore, thirty minutes should be chopped out. Not to worry, I'm pleased by the acting, and the rest is good with a sad ending.

Believe it or not, Final is a sci-fi picture, but there's some daze and confusion going on which is perfectly reasonable because Bill thought it was 400 years later after he got defrosted from the cryogenic storage. Given that he's intelligent to answer some tough trivia questions about history, Bill should've realized the colloquial English language hadn't progressed much from what he's used to.

By the way, there's an actor named Earl Hindman as one of the doctors. If you can cover most of his face and just watch his eyes, it's him as the neighbor behind the fence in Tim Allen's TV sitcom Home Improvement. Final is the last film of Earl Hindman's career before passing away from lung cancer two years later.

All in all, Final is a well-done sci-fi picture that's very much performance-driven.