Is the Nikon 24-120 f4 a perfect versatile filming lens?

It seems like it could be. On an FX camera I think I'd rarely want to go below f4 for filming (too thin DOF) and 24-120 is a very significant range, I think it'd probably be all I'd ever need. It has VR, which is always good. My only concern might be quality (or if there are better or better value alternatives). From what I've heard it's very sharp, but has a bit of distortion, which may or may not bother me depending on how noticeable it is. One thing that worries me is that I've heard one or two reviews mention a little bit of play in the focus ring. Is this found in all copies or did they maybe have faulty ones? Also, any filmographers out there, do you think this would be a major problem for manual focus filming?

All zoom lenses have compromises in their design, it's just the Laws of Optics, good qualities have to be sacrificed to get the zoom function, the wider the zoom range the more compromised they are.

The first compromise is aperture, as wide apertures allow the camera to have a bright image on it's sensor even in dim light it has a knock on effect on noise too. The only real way to avoid noise is for the sensor to see lot's of light.

An ideal lens will have no distortions, have a 'flat field' (sharp right into the corners), have no vignetting (darker into the corners) and have high resolution, and contrast (these last two vie against each other in that higher contrast usually comes at the cost of resolution and vice verse, a high contrast lens can look sharper than a high resolution lens - it's called 'perceived sharpness'. Zero colour cast, perfect colour correction (bad colour correction is what leads to Chromatic Aberration). Some or all of these are sacrificed, at least to some extent as soon as you introduce zoom into the design, compromises have to be made.

All the Indie film makers I know all use prime wide aperture lenses, for the most part, chosen to get the 'look' they want, the clinical look of a Zeiss/Yashica or Leica lens or the more mellow look of a Voigtlander or most any (except Yashica) Japanese lens. Most older manual lenses are easily adapted to 'pull focus'. For film making the focus ring has to give you repeatability, you calibrate the focus planes on a shot then move from one to the other as the scene progresses, usually several times for different takes, there should be no 'play' in the focus ring, repeatability is key.