Final Destination 3 (2006)

Changing one’s mind is an occupational hazard of being a film reviewer. It’s dangerous to re-watch films after reviewing them, in case your opinions alter, or, heaven forfend, you realise you were actually wrong. It’s quite possible for me to change my mind without actually watching the movie again, though (Batman Begins, anyone? Did someone slip me some hallucinogenic drugs for that one? Oh dear.) and shamefully, it seems to have happened in the case of the Final Destination series. Final Destination 3 is still as completely brainless as its predecessors, so maybe it’s just the effect of having watched it on a big screen, but somehow, the inanity of it all doesn’t seem to matter: who cares if there’s nothing between the gory killings when the gory killings are just so darned fun?

As per, Final Destination 3 starts with a spectacular set piece: after the exploding plane of the original and the zillion car pile-up of Final Destination 2, the filmmakers have scaled things back a notch, somehow managing to make a much smaller disaster far, far more exhilarating. The dazzling sequence taps into every fear an amusement park goer might have as a rollercoaster goes dramatically wrong: the hydraulics are on the fritz, the tracks are broken, the restraints come unlocked and people fly out of their seats, and the car gets stuck upside down in the middle of a loop. The movie follows the coaster on its ascent, and with a combination of atmospheric music and cunning camerawork, perfectly evokes the sensation of being aboard a rollercoaster – which is something no-one who’s seen this movie will probably ever want to do, ever again.

The sequence is so breathtaking, in fact, that an entire cinema full of squabbling 15 year olds fell silent for its duration. Once that scene was over, they all started shrieking and giggling again, but for a few minutes, they were captivated – a pretty darned impressive feat for a big silly movie of this kind.

The rest of the movie follows precisely the path laid out by the previous two movies: one teenager has a vision of the impending disaster and manages to save themselves as well as several other randoms. Death, understandably, gets pissed off that they’ve thwarted him (her? It?) and picks off the survivors in increasingly nasty ways, in approximately the order they were originally supposed to die. Somehow, it’s become even simpler and more obvious this time around: probably because the audience already knows the score, so there’s little to no point spending time with the new set of kids finding out what’s going on – they just look it up on the internet. Sorted: let the killing commence. Once the deaths start, they don’t really stop. The clues are far more obvious this time around: Death has, handily, stuck clues into all the pictures taken on the night of the crash. It’s best not to think too hard about this, because – the pictures were taken before the crash, before Wendy had a vision, before she saved anyone, and before Death had to take revenge, so why are there clues there? Yeah, like I said: don’t think about it too much. It doesn’t help that the clues are mostly pretty oblique, too – and actually, now that I come to think about it, I think maybe there aren’t clues there, at all. Everyone gets killed in the course of their everyday life, doing things they do anyway; it’s just kind of a coincidence that there happened to be pictures of them doing similar things. This explanation makes more sense to me than that Wendy could read anything at all into the picture of Ashley and Ashlyn – they’re holding a carnival prize, it’s a bit blurry, and they burn alive on a sunbed. No matter how many times the camera zoomed into this picture, and the sound department made spooky noises, I couldn’t see any clues – so I guess if Death’s stalking you, I’m not a good person to have around.

As is only to be expected, each death is gleefully messy and painful, and events build to a crescendo at a town celebration, before the inevitable let’s-wrap-things-up conclusion. By the standards of the later deaths, the rollercoaster seems remarkably quick and clean –for the most part we don’t see much of any specific deaths – but it works as an introduction, and the rest of the movie keeps the action and the shocks coming thick and fast, so much so that there’s barely time to relax between them. The comedy is mostly physical, because the script is pretty poor, and the characters are pretty non-existent, but: it’s a Final Destination movie, and audience members know what they’re signing up for.

I could nitpick a little more, because there are plenty of plotholes, and I’d also like to contest the casting director’s choices somewhat, but in the end, what matters is the carnage. And I’m pleased to report there’s plenty of it.

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Final Destination 2 (2003)

If you thought Final Destination was a mess of conflicting themes and ideas that eventually boiled down to a mash of nonsense, well, you probably wouldn't watch Final Destination 2, and that'd be the end of it. Helmed this time by David R Ellis, a man better known for his stunt work than his directing, Final Destination 2 is more of the same -- in every aspect but the fear.

The survivors of the original flight are now all dead, with the notable exception of Clear (Ali Larter), who's booked herself into the penthouse suite at the local looney bin -- a padded room where nothing in the slightest bit dangerous can reach her. Death still isn't any good at his job, though, because right before an enormous pile-up on a highway, teenager Kimberly (A. J. Cook) has a vision of the disaster and manages to save some people from their grisly demises. She's not good enough to actually save any of her friends, though -- which is fortunate, because one of her friends is the most hideously ugly boy ever committed to celluloid -- and instead is forced to team up with the other survivors.

Confession time: one of those survivors -- the greasy, stupid, druggy one -- is played by Jonathan Cherry, and that's actually the whole reason I watched either of these movies. I wish I hadn't, though; Mr Cherry needs a new agent, or some talent, stat.

Perhaps predictably, Kim breaks Clear out of the mental asylum and they go back to see the creepy morgue guy, who spins them some rubbish about how to cheat death, they need to balance the scales by creating new life. Yeah, balance the scales by creating life. It flies in the face of all logic, because that actually imbalances the scales further, so what you'd really need to do in order to convince Death to skip you would be to kill someone else, but that's another, much darker movie, so let's pretend their way makes sense. After all, we're already dealing with a movie that relies on the premise that a biological function has not only purpose but also intent and malevolence, and that life is merely a long game of not dying, so it's not as if any more nonsense is out of their way or anything.

It probably isn't a good idea to even try to follow the ideas here, because -- well, okay, somehow, by surviving, thanks to a mysterious vision and a combination of signs that may as well have been huge flashing neon signs reading 'You're Going To Die In 5 Minutes,' people confuse Death and throw the entire universe out of whack. Death, much like Santa, has a list, only instead of being divided into two 'naughty' and 'nice' columns, his is divided into categories like 'razor wire' and 'aviation fuel' or 'big stonking pole through the face.' It's also apparently sub-divided into many smaller lists, because otherwise there'd be some crazy backlog of cancer patients and starving children who can't die till some idiot explodes a barbecue in his face. Which makes no sense, and I think I can smell my brain frying.

Basically, Final Destination 2 is pretty much a straight continuation of the first movie, only somehow far less coherent. Watch at your own peril.

IMDB link

Final Destination (2000)

There are a several ways I can imagine the pitch for Final Destination being thought up. Maybe the screenwriter was booked onto a flight that, for one reason or another, he never actually got on, and it crashed, sending him into an uncontrollable spiral of survivor's guilt and leading him to write the movie as a way to deal with all the "what ifs" that plague him when he wakes up in the middle of the night. In another, the hapless writer got fired from working on another movie, and plotted to make his own movie -- but the only thing he was ever any good at was writing the death scenes. In yet another, an all-night, drug-fuelled Mousetrap marathon caused writers to see death everywhere they turned, as a distant but inevitable consequence of every single minute action.

Whatever happened, I'm sure it initially seemed like a good idea. Issues of predestination vs. free will and the ways in which fate and chance affect our lives seem like good, solid themes for a movie; throw in a hot young cast and a generous amount of self-awareness, and we should've been onto a winner. The fact that director James Wong was a writer on both The X Files and Millennium should also have been a bonus, as are the amazingly set-up deaths. Somehow, though, it just didn't work out.

On a class trip to France, a student foresees an accident wherein he and everyone else on the plane die, horribly and painfully. Panicking, he manages to get himself, six of his fellow students and their teacher off the plane before it does indeed explode. Understandably shaken, the survivors' problems aren't over yet -- one by one, they start getting killed off in horrible accidents of their own. Incredibly overblown, amazingly contrived accidents that involve one small element catalysing a crazy chain of events that culminates in spectacular deaths. Somehow, Alex (Devon Sawa, aka Casper), the student who originally foresaw the accident, manages to get involved at every crime scene, making him a prime suspect for the FBI agents investigating the case. For the few survivors left, it becomes a race against time to figure out "Death's" pattern and thwart his plans. Luckily, another survivor, Clear (Ali Larter) is an empath, and there's a spooky guy at the morgue who apparently knows far more about death than is ever really healthy, so there's plenty of opportunity for impossible exposition.

The problem is that the movie doesn't ever quite seem to know what it wants to be. It's not scary enough to really be a horror movie; there are moments that inspire sympathetic cringes from the audience, but nothing like real fear. It's not knowing or tongue-in-cheek enough to ever be really funny; it's not really clever enough to make any real observations about the nature of life and death, and if anything it seems to shy away from its bigger themes in favour of the crazy chain-o-death kills. Which, don't get me wrong, are certainly enjoyable, but something somewhere along the line didn't quite get thought out thoroughly enough. There's a distinct sense of having lost brain cells after watching Final Destination, which is never an inspiring recommendation.

The movie does have one glaringly obvious use, though: fodder for drinking games. Drink every time there's a logical inconsistency; drink every time you wish a character would get on and die; drink every time water is directly involved in a death; drink every time you think you know how a kill's going to pan out and you're wrong...

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