If The Breakfast Club had been directed by a disgruntled substitute teacher who just discovered Hot Topic and a gallon of fake blood, you’d get The Final. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a guidance counselor’s fever dream — one where the words “anti-bullying message” are scrawled in pig’s blood across the blackboard.
This 2010 psychological horror-thriller (a term used loosely here) wants to be Carrie meets Saw meets Heathers. What it actually is, though, is the film you’d show at detention to convince kids not to pursue film school. Written by Jason Kabolati and directed by Joey Stewart, The Final is a 93-minute morality play about bullying, revenge, and how even nerds can be boring psychopaths.
🎓 “School’s Out Forever — and So Is Subtlety”
The movie opens on a girl with a face that looks like it lost a fight with a vat of Drain-O, walking into a diner while everyone stares at her like she’s the world’s most confusing Yelp review. She cries, and we’re treated to a flashback — because God forbid a horror movie just start at the beginning.
We’re then introduced to our cast of tortured high school stereotypes: Dane the brooding loner, Emily the bullied girl, Ravi the nerd, Jack the quiet psycho, and Andy the one even the script forgot about. They’re all mistreated by the school’s beautiful bullies, who seem to have wandered in from a bad CW pilot. Everyone’s hair is suspiciously perfect for a public high school in Texas, and every insult sounds like it was written by someone who’s never been bullied but has watched a Degrassi marathon.
And then there’s Kurtis, the one “good” popular kid — the human equivalent of a participation trophy. He’s an aspiring actor, which explains why he occasionally looks like he’s auditioning for a Crest commercial in the middle of a torture scene.
🔪 “Saw, But Make It Teen Angst”
Our band of outcasts decide to take revenge on their tormentors by throwing a costume party. Nothing says “you’ll regret bullying me” like an Evite with a blood theme. They drug the punch, chain everyone up, and decide to teach them a lesson — one limb at a time.
From here, The Final becomes a teenage Saw sequel shot in a garage. The problem isn’t the gore — it’s the sheer monotony of it. These kids talk about revenge like they’re in a TED Talk on misanthropy, and then proceed to torture people with all the creativity of a YouTube prank channel.
Needles in the face? Check. Acid burns? Check. Gratuitous finger-severing? Of course. It’s like the filmmakers wrote “Pain” on a whiteboard and just kept adding exclamation points.
The violence could’ve worked as biting satire — Heathers meets Hostel — but the film takes itself so seriously you start to wonder if it’s a parody that forgot it was one. Every scene screams, “Look, society made us do it!” while the audience screams, “Make it stop.”
☠️ “The Breakfast Club, But Everyone Fails”
The film wants to say something profound about bullying and the cycle of violence, but it delivers its message with all the grace of a fire alarm going off during an exam. We get long monologues about social inequality and teen cruelty that sound like rejected Law & Order: SVU dialogue.
The outcasts, meant to be sympathetic, come across as TEDx speakers at a convention for aspiring serial killers. Emily (Lindsay Seidel) is particularly absurd — she’s bullied one day and then turns into a Bond villain with access to chemical weapons the next. If revenge was a GPA, these kids went from failing to PhD-level sadism overnight.
Meanwhile, the bullies aren’t characters — they’re cardboard cutouts labeled “Mean Girl #1” and “Jock Who Deserves It.” They spend the first act being cruel and the second act being flayed. Emotional nuance? Not in this syllabus.
🧠 “Psychology 101: How Not to Write One”
It’s clear that The Final desperately wants to be a “psychological thriller.” Unfortunately, the psychology is about as deep as a puddle in the school parking lot. Dane, the ringleader, gives a speech about revenge that would sound overwrought even on a MySpace blog from 2007.
He’s supposed to be this tragic, vengeful mastermind — but he’s mostly just the kind of guy who corrects your grammar mid-murder. His transformation from awkward student to torture architect is so abrupt it’s like the movie skipped a few chapters. One minute he’s getting shoved into lockers; the next he’s designing a bear trap–based home security system.
And let’s not forget Ravi — the “nice one” who decides halfway through that maybe this murder thing isn’t cool after all. His change of heart lasts about 10 seconds before Dane stabs him for being reasonable. That’s the movie’s moral compass in a nutshell: empathy gets you killed, monologues get you screen time.
🚔 “Meanwhile, at the Police Department…”
When a deputy finally gets involved, he’s immediately shot — because authority figures in horror movies exist solely to die offscreen. The only adult with potential, an old war vet named Parker, limps into the movie halfway through like he took a wrong turn from Gran Torino and just decided to stay.
He gets about five minutes of screen time before getting mutilated by a booby trap that looks like it was assembled from a Home Depot clearance aisle. You can almost hear Clint Eastwood watching this scene somewhere, muttering, “Amateurs.”
🔥 “A Final Act That Should’ve Stayed Drafted”
By the time the police arrive, most of the cast is dead, the message is lost, and the audience is Googling how long 93 minutes actually is. Emily kills Dane, then kills herself — because poetic justice apparently requires a shotgun. Kurtis survives, and so does one of the Triplets (the film’s discount version of The Three Stooges, if they’d traded pies for pistols).
We end where we began — with Bridget, now disfigured, crying in a diner while dramatic piano music begs us to care. We don’t. She’s meant to represent the tragic cycle of violence, but by this point, the only cycle I’m thinking about is the washing machine I could’ve been running instead of watching this.
💬 “Dialogue Written by a Cautionary Poster”
The script is full of lines that sound like they were written by someone who’s never met a teenager. Characters talk like walking Facebook statuses from 2009: “We’ll make them understand what it’s like to feel pain!” “They’ll know our suffering!” It’s less dialogue, more Hot Topic manifesto.
Even the moments meant to be shocking fall flat. Acid to the face? Predictable. Fingers chopped off? Old news. The only real shocker is that the actors managed to keep straight faces through this mess.
The performances aren’t bad, per se — they’re just trapped in a script that mistakes moralizing for meaning. Marc Donato (as Dane) does his best brooding impression, while Jascha Washington (as Kurtis) looks perpetually confused, like he’s still not sure why his agent said yes.
🎭 “The Final Grade”
At its core, The Final thinks it’s delivering a profound anti-bullying message — a horror movie with social conscience. Instead, it delivers something between Mean Girls and Martyrs, but without the intelligence, wit, or purpose of either. It’s less a statement on cruelty than an awkward attempt at edge.
The cinematography is decent — moody lighting, some nice shadows — but you can’t light your way out of bad writing. The pacing drags like detention on a Friday, and the score sounds like it was composed entirely of leftover CSI cues.
The message is muddled, the tone inconsistent, and the ending depressingly self-important. By the credits, you realize the real victims are the viewers who stayed until the end.
Final Verdict:
A revenge movie so obsessed with moral lessons it forgets to be entertaining. The Final is the kind of film that makes you want to write a strongly worded letter — not to the bullies, but to the screenwriter.
Grade: F+ (for “Failed catharsis, decent lighting”)
If there’s a lesson here, it’s simple: don’t bully people. But more importantly — don’t make The Final 2.
