Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
You do this long enough, you learn a few lessons. I watched We Need to Talk About Kevin some time ago and never want to see it again, but I didn’t bother to write it up. Now it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, so I’m going to have to watch it again. What does that have to do with The Final Destination, a.k.a. Final Destination 4? It’s the only film in the Final Destination series that isn’t on the list. I’m reviewing it in self-defense. I don’t think it’s ever going to show up, but I sure as hell don’t want to sit through it again. This is entirely proactive.
The Final Destination is the low point in the series. There’s a reason it hasn’t shown up on the They Shoot Zombies list. While most of them have a sub-3.0 rating on Letterboxd, this one is the lowest by nearly a full point. There are reasons for this. In addition to me not wanting to have to watch this again, I’m hoping to prevent you from wasting the 82 minutes it takes to get through this one.
You should know the basics of this by now. At the start of the movie, someone has a premonition of a terrible accident in which a number of people are killed. That person freaks out, and a bunch of people avoid the accident (which happens anyway), and now, thwarted from its body count, Death itself tracks down the people who survived and kills them through a bizarre series of accidents and Rube Goldberg-style devices in the order they were going to die in the first place. Eventually, the person who had the original premonition figures this out and decides that the only way to stop the carnage is to break the chain. There will always be someone they forgot about who messes up their order. There will be misdirection, and eventually we’ll get to the end where, most of the time, our survivors finally don’t survive. Roll credits.
One of the problems with The Final Destination is that if you’ve seen the first three movies, you know exactly the pattern that is going to happen for this one. It’s exactly what is outlined above. This time, the inciting incident isn’t a plane crash, a highway accident (still the best one), or a roller coaster failure, but a massive crash at a speedway. It’s almost as if this one is trying to piggyback on what was clearly the highest point of the series.
So this time, our new main character, Nick (Bobby Campo) has a premonition of a car crash at the speedway he is at with his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten), and their friends Janet (Haley Webb) and direct-from-central-casting douchebag Hunt (Nick Zano). We get the traditional huge accident, which turns out to be the premonition, and then everything starts happening exactly as it happened in the premonition. Nick freaks out, his friends and a few other people follow him out, and the accident happens. It’s straight out of the playbook.
If you’ve seen any of the movies, you know what’s coming. We’re going to see a series of accidents that involve the people from the opening accident. There are going to naturally be some head fakes—we’ll see some deaths set up in one way that happen in another. The entirety of this film is about showing us what we’re expecting to see—wildly coincidental deaths—but in ways that we haven’t seen them before. It’s a “how do they die this time?” collection with the same plot we’ve seen three times before. In fact, the only real innovation this time is the addition of 3D, which naturally should have been in the third installment. It’s clearly a 3D film even without it, and it’s also clear that the gimmick didn’t work very well.
Bluntly, I’m not expecting the fourth movie in a series to be showcase of originality, but this is depressing. Look up “cash grab” in the dictionary, and you’ll see this movie poster.
As depressing as this is to say, there’s nothing to recommend The Final Destination aside from someone who wants to complete the full series (and there’s a rumored sixth film in the works). In addition to characters who have no real personality beyond “survived the first accident” in most cases, The Final Destination has some of the worse CGI effects ever seen. One of the joys of the previous films in the series is that everything really looked good. People who have seen Final Destination 2 still won’t drive behind a log truck. The switch to CGI might have been cheaper, but it looks it. The movements look fake and the blood looks fake. This might have been barely acceptable in about 2001. In 2009, it looks like a studio that didn’t care about making a functional movie.
The only really good thing about The Final Destination is that if you figure in the five-minute final credits, the stupid thing is only about 77 minutes long.
Why to watch The Final Destination: Because you feel like you need to before you see Final Destination 5.
Why not to watch: Staggeringly bad CGI.