The Final Destination

Review by Jason Donner

 

Final Destination was an unappreciated classic.  Final Destination 2 is an excellent black comedy.  Final Destination 3 was something that made me think that the giddy gory magic that made this silly series so gruesomely enjoyable was beginning to wane.  When I heard that there was going to be a Final Destination 4 - and that it was called The Final Destination for some strange reason - I just couldn't get myself excited.

The Final Destination never matches the ingenuity of the first movie nor the sick humor of the second, but at least it's better than the third and, on its own, not a bad little movie in its own right.

This time around, a few young yuppies leave a raceway when one of their friends gets a precognition of a terrible crash.  Of course, if you're the least bit familiar with these movies you know that the crash actually happens and soon, everyone who was supposed to have died in the accident starts dying off in the order they were supposed to have really died in; And they die in the most horrible ways imaginable from getting pulled down a street while on fire to having your ass sucked through a pool drain.

No, I'm not making that up.

Death, you see, is a living entity and every now and then someone gets a peek into its grand master plan and thwarts it.  This makes death rather upset and so death seeks out to take what is rightfully his in as many painful and horrifying ways possible.  He seems to enjoy grinding gears and blunt objects this time around.

The Final Destination is one of the funniest comedies I've seen all year.  How can you honestly watch a movie where a lady is put in peril by a car wash of doom in a sequence almost stolen from Superman III and not laugh hysterically?  This movie is a cynical riot where pretty people are flies and death is the windshield.

It may not be that bad, but it is stale and smacks of predictability and lame characters.  No one in this movie is identifiable like they were in the previous outings.  Face it, when that mom bought it in the elevator or Seann William Scott got beheaded, it almost made you cry, didn't it?  In The Final Destination, watching these 2D characters in a 3D blender will affect you about as much as me breaking wind - which I have done several times writing this review.  See, it didn't affect you!

Let's be serious here for a moment: This movie is what it is and it does what it does just good enough to be entertaining.  This isn't going to be a horror classic and it has a very low probability of showing up in my future bluray collection, but as a temporary diversion and a way to enjoy some good old-fashioned Schadenfreude, it succeeds and, really, was there anything more we were expecting from The Final Destination than that?  I think not.