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Blade Runner: The Final Cut

A cohesive revision from Ridley Scott

By BRETT MICHEL | November 14, 2007

3.5 Stars

Harrison Ford

"Are you for real?” asks stripper Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), snake draped around her nearly naked frame as she’s confronted by “blade runner” Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a semi-retired gumshoe charged with locating and “retiring” four renegade “replicants” –– 21st-century cyborg slave laborers. Neither the dick nor the dancer (and certainly not the reptile) is entirely “human,” but that’s the clever conceit of Ridley Scott’s dystopian vision of 2019 Los Angeles: in such an ersatz locale, what is “real”? The differences between this ostensibly final revision of Scott’s influential “future noir” and his 1992 “director’s cut” are subtle yet cohesive. Ford’s voiceover from the ’82 original remains absent, and that allows his appropriately synthetic acting to clash with Rutger Hauer’s sympathetic hyper-emoting as Christ-like replicant Roy Batty, more than ever the film’s ironically “human” archetype: man in search of his maker.117 minutes | Coolidge Corner

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