Killing time with movies

Today I watched “Final Girl” on Netflix. It was … unsatisfying. Not only because the story felt incomplete, but because I felt that I myself could sense more in the background than the movie itself ever showed.

To begin with, what was Veronica being trained for? Her handler picked her up when she was a child, first mobilized her when she was a young woman, but we never saw any sense of a larger mission. (Film summaries say she was trained from childhood to deal with the four preppie assholes who made a hobby of hunting and killing young women, but she’d been in training much longer than they’d been active. That’s in the first place; in the second, the hardest part of catching a serial killer is establishing his identity, so if these guys were already known, they could have been apprehended and prosecuted easily.) It doesn’t hold together logically, nor was there any reason for Veronica to be sent to go along with their little game other than to give the movie a chance to show her visiting payback against them.

It didn’t hold together. It didn’t work. And, as I said above, I could feel possibilities that were never touched.

The child Veronica was far too accepting of the death of her parents: one might even say ‘unmoved’. The man interviewing her (and later taking on the role of her trainer) said a “very bad man” had killed his wife and daughter. These elements could have been used for a much more imaginative story of a sociopath — the trainer — being put on a leash and tasked to prepare another sociopath — child Veronica — to carry out distasteful work that nonetheless needed to be done. (Yes, in this scenario he would have been the “very bad man” who killed his family.) So, okay, it’s only a general notion, and it would have required a lot of work, but it really could have been made into something.

I also watched “Avengers Grimm”. That one was just plain dumb … but, once over, it was over. “Final Girl” leaves me with the feeling of a lot of unfulfilled potential, and that annoys me.