‘The Final Destination’ Should Be Killed
-----With a movie all about killing people in exotic ways, what can one hope for other than cheap entertainment? Of course, there is always the possibility that it won’t even be entertaining, and that means it would just suck. ‘The Final Destination’ is one of those films that fails even to hold your attention for 80 minutes, despite that being the sole purpose of its existence; that and the money the film’s make from everyone who pays to see them.
-----When a young dude has a premonition that a deadly accident will occur at a racecar event, he rushes his friends out of the stadium. When the premonition comes true, “death” comes back to kill all of his friends and himself in the order they were supposed to die before the premonition. Why “death” decided to give them this premonition, who knows? Why anyone pays to see these movies…the plot thickens. Too bad the same can’t be said for the franchise.
-----Bobby Campo is drone number one, Nick O'Bannon. In a cast that may as well be reading the lines from the last ‘Final Destination,’ everyone just goes about their business playing the archetypes. Campo is the well meaning protagonist who has the premonition. Shantel VanSanten is his super hot girlfriend. Nick Zano is the stupid jock womanizer, and Haley Webb plays the boring, Janet Cunningham. The only member of the cast who I really liked at all was Mykelti Williamson, as racetrack security guard, George Lanter. It’s not that I hated Campo and VanSanten’s personalities; I just got extremely bored watching them, whereas I had a vague semblance of entertainment when Williamson was on screen. What more can you say about boring people reading a boring script that probably took about five minutes to write?
-----The problem with ‘The Final Destination’ is that the deaths aren’t even fun to watch anymore. The movie has wholeheartedly conceded plot, including any chance of them escaping death, and yet it can’t even manage to think up creative ways for them to die. Not to mention that the deaths are so amazingly stupid in this one that it doesn’t even make an attempt at scaring anyone in the audience. How is it scary to see someone get sucked down a pool drain? In fact, the movie just cuts away for that occurrence. I might be able to fathom getting drowned by getting held underwater by a pool drain, but the movie literally cuts away, and then entrails come out of a nearby pipe. This is only after a plastic water gun has fallen and managed to switch a giant metal lever to, “drain.” Oh yeah, and I almost forgot the token nude scene right before the infamous drain incident. Sure wouldn’t be a crappy horror film without the unnecessary token nudity.
Technically, the film is as adequate and unassuming as anything else about the film. The occasional bad bit of cinematography definitely doesn’t help, and the music, excluding the credits, is pretty boring too. One thing that is somewhat entertaining is the x-ray skeleton opening credits, which show deaths of past films x-ray style. I didn’t get to see it in 3-D, but the gimmick of someone getting stabbed by a three-dimensional pole probably gets boring after the about the fifth time. In reality, this is just a remake of the franchises’ prior movies with added 3-D, ending the exact same way as all of the other flicks as it struggles to keep you awake during its runtime.
-----Do I really need to spell it out for you? This film sucks. Even for fans of prior entries into the franchise, having seen the third entry, I can let you know this one is a nig step down from a movie that wasn’t anything special to start with. It’s frustrating too, because there’re actually some cool questions that could be raised if the franchise ever decided to delve into giving their leads some sort of why and how these things were happening to them. Instead, we get a movie that probably won’t bore you until early in the third act, and that only gets a few “so bad it’s good” laughs from what are intended to be scary moments. I can only hope the franchise goes the way of its protagonists, but thanks to everyone who paid to make it the weekend winner at the box office, that’s a long shot.
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