Final Draft

I saw a trailer for this movie and was looking forward to seeing it.I really liked James Van Der Beek in the movie called "the plague". Final draft starts off with his character having a weird nightmare and then starts off pretty normal from there until he starts to encounter strange people.There are not many characters in this film but it was still well acted.James plays Paul, a lonely writer who seems to only have 1 friend and a past that we see clips of through his home videos.He is determined to write a screenplay and locks himself in his apartment to write a story from his childhood about a clown who gets set on fire and dies on stage during a performance as some kids are laughing at him as he perishes in the flames.The clown then comes back from the dead to get revenge on the now grown up kids.Paul and his brother were at the show as kids.It has troubled him ever since and he is haunted by thoughts of the kids laughing at him dying being the last thing the clown saw before he died.He is seeing spooky visions of the clown and the people around him are being terrorized mysteriously.Cabin fever sets in and he is living bad dreams.It is hard to distinguish between reality and fiction in this movie, and is a little confusing because there were so many flashbacks in his head happening all at once without much detail or explanation.The characters were a bit undeveloped but it was still a decent movie that makes you think.

A depressed writer (with some inevitable personal problems dictated by the Universal Movie Law) strives to complete a screenplay and has himself locked up in his flat above a garage by an actor friend. Needless to say, writer's block hits him hard and the characters from his past - wife, school bully, deceased brother and a Stephenkingesque 'clown after sundown' among others - jump at the chance to perform their hallucinative act to the poor man on the brink of sanity.

With nothing too brilliant or original to flag, this cheapie still provides some frights and might evoke some thoughts if you happen to be the thinking type. The main character is likable enough to keep the interest in his downhill life alive, but it still is a one man film about a one man's story, and if the inner struggles of a writer in a block don't make your heart beat double pace, you'll regrettably find this film to be a very slow moving, somewhat predictable and repetitious. At times it's also a bit complicated, as the multi-leveled past comes alive in random samples through the writer's hallucinations.

As indie flicks go, this one is quite neat and worthy a look. The problem is, all this has been done before, better and with much, much more money in the budget.

I think a lot of the bad reviews here were written by people expecting a straight horror flick. I know their rebuttal will be that they were expecting a 'good movie' but to each his own. This is more of a psychological drama. There is a palpable state of tension throughout as we really don't know where the the main character's hallucinations are going to take him. It kept me watching so I gave it a higher mark than most.

Final Draft - A screenwriter (James Van Der Beek) locks himself into his apartment and succumbs to psychosis in an attempt to write a horror script. Not a terrible premise, but the execution is awful. This feels like a first year direction and writing job, and probably is. The director jump cuts the hell out of everything. It's meant to be disorienting. What it IS is annoying. So much so that small chunks of film are incoherent. The writing is predictable, and doesn't use follow through on most of the ideas it offers (bag of oranges). It's like they ran out of time and slap-dashed it together for the Toronto Film Festival.

This film is not jaw-droppingly "oh my god it's so bad it's good" bad. It's boring bad, and irritates you for a long time afterward. James Van Der Beek is not a terrible actor, and keeps the ship barely above water. But he's too normal for the kind of psychosis the film tries to offer. He is merely a withdrawn guy who one day sees people and hallucinates things, then decides to act mildly deranged. Cause follows effect. Maybe there's something in the water. Now Darryn Lucio, who plays his "friend", is a terrible actor. He shares the likeness of Chris O'Donald and is even more annoying, a superhuman achievement.

The atmosphere the film provides is good (dull gray and somber), but as it's the only thing the film achieves it means nothing. This film wants to be Jacob's Ladder or The Machinist. It isn't even Secret Window. It's the preppy girl in class deciding to turn goth.

Not irksomely terrible, but the sheer stupidity of it will ebb at you. I've already put more thought into this critique than the filmmakers did for this.

D

Jonathan Dueck's 'Final Draft' doesn't show us much what we haven't already seen before. The director tries to make it mysterious, suspenseful and ambiguous but not much happens until the last half hour. Darryn Lucio writes and costars. While the premise is interesting, the pacing is at fault. It takes almost an entire hour for the story to take off. 'Final Draft' seems to take much of its inspiration from Stephen King's 'It' and 'Secret Window'. Even though it's made within a small budget, it' quite well-made and the visuals in the last half hour are quite well done. The dark and gloomy atmosphere is The characterization was quite clichéd and that makes the situations less interesting. James Van Der Beek turns in a decent performance as the tormented writer suffering from writer's block and fighting his past but the rest of the cast is uninteresting. So, there is nothing refreshing about 'Final Draft'. It's painfully slow, clichéd and tries too hard while failing.