Final Draft (2007)
(In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) I’m normally a very forgiving viewer when it comes to movies about writers. I’d like to think that I share some kinship with that avocation, and fiction-about-fiction often delves into the fascinating frontier between reality and fantasy, often with characters popping to life to make life difficult for the writers. That is certainly the case in Final Draft, a horror film about a screenwriter (James Van Der Beek, not bad) who voluntarily locks himself in an apartment in a desperate effort to force himself to complete the draft of the film he’s supposed to be writing. It does not go well — his imagination gets the better of him, and soon enough his characters are making him crazy. There’s some promise here, but it’s almost entirely extinguished by limp, unsympathetic, overly glum execution. The long prologue leading to the protagonist locking himself up in his apartment does very little to make him likable or even apparently competent: he comes across as a schmuck who lucked out on getting a script produced (admittedly a cool thing that I envy) but otherwise a terrible young man with few redeeming qualities. You won’t exactly root for him to overcome both his writer’s block and his demons in order to produce a quality script, and indeed it’s not all that disappointing when he ultimately fails to do so. As for the madness inside the apartment and his head, it’s all handled with a great deal less energy than it should — the delusions aren’t particularly witty nor funny nor sexy nor anything interesting. There’s a killer clown that takes up a lot of space and time without much of a payoff — almost as if the screenwriter (of Final Draft) didn’t have enough confidence in his own material not to bring in another cliché to round things up — even if acknowledging it as such! There is a tremendous amount of wasted opportunity here: director Jonathan Dueck’s execution is limp and never even starts taking advantage of the elements it has to play with. By the time the film reaches its downbeat conclusion, well, who cares — Final Draft makes a powerful case that one less mediocre horror screenwriter isn’t such a terrible thing.
