Movie Marathon: 'Final Destination' Pt. 4
The original director returned for the third movie and it sucked. Now the director of the superior second film is returning! This bodes well.
Cast: Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Haley Webb, Nick Zano, Mykelti Williamson, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella
Plot: Nick has a a vision while attending a speedway and predicts a violent accident, leading to him and a small group avoiding the tragedy. Having messed up Death's plan, each survivor begins getting picked off in random accidents.
Review: Whoops, the film made an accident in it's pants.
With the bold title of THE Final Destination, implying some epic finale, and reinforcing this by recapping all the previous deaths in an x-ray themed opening credits, this is a massive clunker. First up, there's the CGI gore somehow getting worse than previous entries and visions appearing as Playstation 2 graphics. Then there's the cheesy 3D effects which we obviously weren't seeing on DVD but were distracting due to the dumb framing of shots to emphasise the gimmick.
At the actors manage to remain on par with the effects by being downright awful. The characters are all shallow and pointless. The main character has two responses to every situation: shaking his head after a disturbing vision or handing his hand under his nose when someone dies. I don't even remember any of their names.
This series being what it is, a lot can be forgiven with creative death scenes. Unfortunately there's very little here to enjoy. We have a long, drawn out sequence with a literal soccer mom in a beauty parlour where we see endless set-up with no pay off. Shampoo gets spilled, the chair is broken, the ceiling fan drops from the roof, her kids slide along the floor, scissors are waved around near eyes...in the end it's all filler and she gets hit by a rock.
Plus there's the girl who nearly gets decapitated by a car wash whilst her boyfriend has his stomach pulled out of his ass by a pool filter in a way that makes it less impacted than when Chuck Palahniuk did it in an earlier book. And a guy gets hit by a truck in a complete copy/paste from the first film. The one genuinely horrifying death sequence even manages to stumble with silliness. How does getting a leg crushed make you cough up blood? Plus someone gets a bathtub dropped on them. For some reason.
Now they do try to mess with the lore and fail miserably. In this sequel the visions have taken on some kind of sentience and literally write messages for the lead. In the past maybe a word will stand out, but this time the visions literally highlight words on a newspaper to explain how to stop Death from hunting them. Is someone controlling the visions? Is there some other entity working against Death?
It makes even less sense where one survivors drops one line about a tragic past and then proceeds to try to kill himself. But because it wasn't 'his time' he can't kill himself. So...are they invincible unless it's their time? They should talk about that because it's a game changer. You can literally do anything to protect the others so long as it isn't your turn to die.
Another strange omission from the story is any intervention from the authorities. In the first film we get the FBI, aviation authorities, police...then in the second we get police involvement and one of the survivors is a deputy sheriff. The third had then leaving a police station at one point, so they at least had a token effort. In this film there's zero suspicion on the group and they never have to speak to anyone. They go from the site of a major accident to hanging out in a bar and shake off all the death they've seen within moments.
I'm guessing the next film will be better because it'll be hard pressed to get worse.
Best/Most Insane Death: Undoubtably the escalator. Being dropped into the mechanism under those things is nightmare fuel.
THE FINAL DESTINATION FILMS RANKED
