Not to be confused with the horror-comedy The Final Girls (which comes out later this year), veteran genre fans should already know what the film's title is referring to: the heroine/last survivor in a horror movie. Based on that alone we can already guess as to what the story might be, which would've been fine had it been as simple and straight forward as the title suggests. This marks the feature film directorial debut for photographer Tyler Shields, who has apparently also dabbled in music videos. I've never heard of the guy until this project was announced years back, so I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. Sadly it's clear that putting it in the hands of an artsy photographer and combining it with a bad script turned what could've been a potentially decent slasher into a boring, nonsensical semi-revenge thriller.

The ridiculous story starts off with a character named William (Wes Bentley) interviewing a little girl named Veronica in an old dirty room (that doesn't seem shady at all). Her parents just died (they never say how, nor does she seem to care) and he asks her a series of questions, eventually coming to the conclusion that she's the type of person he's looking for. He tells her that he has a very important job for her, and with the promise of ice cream, she gladly accepts (entering super creeper territory now).

Jump to 12 years later and it turns out that William was only looking to turn the little girl into a killing machine (*whew*); training and preparing her for all sorts of physical encounters. Up until now Veronica was merely luring creepy old men and teaching them a lesson, but for her final test she will have to take on a group of young serial killers that prey on innocent women (specifically blondes).

Judging from my brief description of the film's plot you can gather that very little in the story makes any kind of sense and many things are simply never explained. Aside from all the plot-holes it takes almost an hour before we get to the good stuff. Before that they just go back and forth with training flashbacks and dull dialogue-filled scenes. Once the action does finally start there's absolutely no gore and barely even any blood. Even an axe to the chest results to nothing since it's so damn dark.

And I personally don't have anything against actress Abigail Breslin, but she was terribly miscast as Veronica. It's just hard to believe that little Abigail can easily manhandle all these dudes that are much larger than her. Not to mention she looked awkward in all her fight scenes, which is an obvious indication that she didn't undergo any sort of actual physical training before filming and if she did it definitely wasn't enough. Though, I'll say that the movie was well shot and had a nice look to it at times, but that's about all the good I can say about it.

Final Girl is a little too dull, nonsensical, and artsy for its own good. The story doesn't make any sense and there's no satisfying deaths or gore to fall back on. I'd recommend skipping this one.