Review: ‘The Final Destination’

The people behind the supernatural ‘Final Destination’ franchise seem to have their formula down pat.  Take a group of teens, and maybe a few wandering adults, and put them in an everyday scenario that winds up killing them all in gory fashion.  One of them has a premonition that leads the rest to safety.  Then, after the group begins living their life as if given a second chance, you start picking them off one by one, as if Death itself is collecting them personally.  Each death is set up in some elaborate manner.  It’s like a splatter-filled version of the board game Mouse Trap with humans, only, at the end of the game, the humans aren’t trapped underneath a huge cage.  They’re laid out without heads or on fire or impaled about four or five times with various, sharp objects.

This time around, the central accident is a race-car accident, one that sends burning cars and engines into the crowd.  Along with the accident, the speedway where it takes place seems to have been built in the 1800s, thus it all comes crashing down.  Once again, a teenager sees visions and has a feeling of impending doom, one that leads he and his friends out of the arena and to safety.  A few follow with them, and, days after the accident, they begin dying in horrible tragedies of their own.

There would be more to offer in this synopsis, but we’ve seen this movie four times now, the same movie, no misdirection. This is probably one of the main, deciding factors in changing the name of this, particular film to, simply, ‘The Final Destination.’  You would think, by this point, there would be some amount of creativity brewing behind the overall story, but that remains to be seen.  All the creativity is directed straight into the overly details ways in which people can meet their demise.  Once again, a ‘Final Destination’ film proves that there may be a million ways to die, but there’s infinite ways to get there.  Maybe, for some die-hard, horror fanatics, it’s enough to just see the same scenarios over and over again with different characters.  For the rest of us, a little creativity goes a long way.

Perhaps the people behind ‘The Final Destination’ felt it was enough to display their been-there-done-that offerings in 3D.  It doesn’t matter that there’s no story, no ingenuity, and absolutely nothing fresh if all the CG limbs and gore are flying at the audience.  That may have been just enough to make this film a passable and fun horror film had that have even been pulled off right.  The lackluster direction and the awful special effects incorporated throughout don’t even make that possible.

David R. Ellis is in the director’s chair this time around, and you would think he could inject some level of entertainment into the film.  He’s had a hand in making soulless and shallow films like ‘Cellular’ and ‘Snakes on a Plane’ watchable by forcing style over substance.  He even made ‘Final Destination 2’ the most fun of the series.  Unfortunately, his return does nothing for the empty shell displayed in this latest entry.  It’s strictly by-the-numbers.  Opening accident to victim 1 to victim 2 to victim 3 and so on and so forth.

There is so much missed opportunity, so much the makers behind this franchise could have done with what they had.  There is a semblance of some creative minds at work behind these films.  Certain scenes in ‘The Final Destination’ prove that.  At one point, Death sets up all kinds of elaborate booby traps and pitfalls for one character in particular, only to have them all fail.  You can practically sense Death as a character getting frustrated at not being able to kill this character.  The scene ends simply with a rock being thrown through the person’s head.  It’s the ‘Final Destination’ equivalent of a child kicking something that isn’t working right.

Another character, played by Mykelti Williams, the only actor on board here who seems to have any acting talent whatsoever, has something deeper in his background.  He is a security guard whose wife and daughter were killed years before in an auto accident, one that was his own fault.  At one point in the film, he comes to terms with the fact that Death is coming for him.  Unfortunately, any sense of depth with this character is quickly squandered and pushed aside for more flashy gore quite literally thrown at the audience.

A scene late in the film takes place in a movie theater where a 3D film is being watched.  This scene is frustrating, because you wonder why the race-car opening was even necessary.   People sitting in a movie theater watching other people being killed in a movie theater would probably bring a lot more thrills and terror than seeing them die at a speedway.  It’s as if the screenwriters were making it up as they were going along, and, by the time they got to writing the theater scene, it was already too late to rewrite the entire opening scene.

If anything has changed over the course of the ‘Final Destination’ series, it’s that, somewhere along the way, it has turned to comedy.  Any sense of horror or dread has completely left the building.  But even as a comedy, this latest entry can only be viewed as a throw-away, a virtually pointless release whose only would-be benefit is its 3D gimmick.  Make no bones about it, the 3D is absolutely a gimmick, and, without it, ‘The Final Destination’ is meaningless on all counts.  No level of flamboyant gore effects and grandiose death scenes could make a film this hollow worth recommending.   When the effects are this lousy and the violence is this boring, there really is nothing this latest installment in the ‘Final Destination’ franchise has to offer anyone.