Final Destination 3

Review by Jason Gaston

Exactly how many trips to the well can this premise survive? Surely watching death get its jollies by killing annoying teenagers in bizarre and creative ways will get old after a while. Surely, watching exploding heads, decapitations, and people getting crushed by large objects will get tiring, right?

I'm sure it will, but it hasn't yet. Amazingly, Final Destination 3 - the movie with the ultimate oxymoron as a title - is a movie fun of mayhem, splatter, and loads of fun.

Then again, when has the senseless death of teenagers ever gotten old?

I'm sure this whole death catches up with you thing will run out of gas eventually, but until it does I will be a vicious defender of this movie franchise and one of its biggest fans.

This time around a group of high school graduates are spared death when one of them gets a vision of a rollercoaster ride gone mad. They get off, the rollercoaster crashes and kills all their friends, and everyone dismisses it as lucky chance.

Then, the merriment begins! You see, death isn't just an inevitability, it's a force of nature and, if you mess with it and deprive it of its prize, it will come after you and your friends in the order that you were meant to die in.

Now, death isn't one to settle for something simple like a heart attack or an aneurysm. That would be going too easy. Death, you see, is an evil sonofabitch and when he comes for you it will be in a brilliant Rube Goldberg fashion... the kind of death that Darwin Awards are made from.

That's really the crux of the plot to movies like this. You know that every high school caricature is going to die, but the fun part is trying to figure out how it's going to happen and, when it does, if very rarely disappoints.

Thankfully, the doomed cannon fodder have an ace up their sleeve in the form of digital pictures taken of themselves before the accident that reveal subtle clues about how they are going to die.

You see, Death may be a cold blooded bastard but at least he gives you a chance. He gives you little hints down the road so that you may thwart him. In a way, he's like The Riddler from Batman... in that his riddles are convoluted and can only be solved by drastic jumps to conclusions that defy all logic.

It's kind of funny, but this time around it seems like Death is making his clues for the remedial class of fate-cheaters. It's like ol' Grim isn't even trying anymore!

I know some folks say that this makes the Final Destination movies predictable. Well, poo on you. Yeah, we know that these guys are going to get killed, but anyone who tells me that they predicted that Terry was going to get creamed by that bus during the first movie is, quite frankly, full of it. That goes for any other death in these movies.

Final Destination 3 continues this glorious line of mayhem and senseless death and gore. I must say that the opening accident is not that impressive and doesn't even come close to the intensity of the airplane crash or the pile-up featured in the first two movies. Also, I don't know if I'm just getting desensitized to violence or what, but this movie really needed a higher body count.

So, let's just settle and call Final Destination 3 the weakest in the series. A lot of the deaths are telegraphed ahead of time thanks to some sloppy direction and it kills some suspense. It's a slight disappointment, but I'll take a movie like this over drivel like When a Stranger Calls anyday.

Final Destination's ever-present and unstoppable villain is one of the more imaginative movie bad guys in recent years and he doesn't get enough damn respect. They say that death and taxes are inevitable, therefore I shall be in line for Final Destination 4 and to hell with anyone who looks down on me for it.