Armed with a cache of weapons, wearing elaborate costumes and spouting the kind of dialogue that feels like it was ripped from the MySpace pages of edgy teenagers, a group of bullied high schoolers take violent revenge (albeit in a PG-13 kind of way, despite the R rating) on their tormentors in "The Final." Essentially, the movie is what it might have looked like had the kid from the famous two personalities meme split into six, watched a couple of "Saw"/"Hostel" knockoffs and unleashed his fury for real. Alternately cringey and compelling in its portrayal of a hijacked party descending into performances of vengeful violence, the movie has an ironic entertainment factor that just about makes up for its cutting away from the more graphic exercises in popular kid punishment that its band of not-quite-villains choose to indulge in. It's bad, but in a fun, ultimately safe way. Also, I loved the subplot about the traumatized Vietnam veteran (Matthew Posey) who gets pulled into the night's events and badly injured by a trap the teens have set in the woods, only to soldier on and get some licks of his own in. I had to appreciate the dark overtones of the movie's ending, too, even if director Joey Stewart and writer Jason Kabolati have the bad guys sign off with another howler. Stewart hasn't directed another movie since "The Final", which is a bit unfortunate since he didn't exactly do a bad job here.
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