THE FINAL CUT
[] (One star)
Push delete. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG- 13 (sexuality, violence). At the Empire, West 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.
TAMPERING with memories has lately been a popular theme, with examples including one of the year’s best movies, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and now, one of the worst, “The Final Cut.”
When a character remarks near the end that “some things are best forgotten,” she could be talking about this dreary, unexciting thriller starring a funereal Robin Williams as Hakman, the world’s best “cutter.”
At an unspecified point in the future, one-third of the world’s population has been implanted with memory chips in utero so that a person’s entire life can be turned into an upbeat movie upon his demise.
Hakman, who specializes in cutting out “the ugly stuff” so he can turn rich scum into post-mortem saints, is commissioned by the widow of an executive for the corporation that markets the implants.
Sitting for hours at a wooden editing console, he unemotionally excises episodes of incest and infidelity – but Hakman is stopped cold by the image of a man who resembles a childhood friend he left for dead after an accident decades earlier.
It’s not a bad premise for a movie, but writer-director Omar Naim, a 26-year-old Lebanese native making his feature debut, proves equally inept at handling plotting, actors and pacing.
He hasn’t a clue how to integrate the main story with a subplot about a group – led by former cutter Jim Caviezel – organizing against memory implants on privacy grounds.
Equally clumsy is Naim’s handling of Hakman’s strained relationship with a woman (Mira Sorvino) who runs a rare-book store.
The relentlessly glum Hakman’s name appears to be an homage to Gene Hackman, who played a monomaniacal professional eavesdropper in “The Conversation,” while Hakman’s oldest friend, Thelma (Mimi Kuzyk) is apparently named after Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor.
Actually, “The Final Cut” was edited by another legendary figure in the field, Dede Allen. But even she couldn’t salvage this.
