Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/21/09
The
world is trying to kill us. Forget all the different ways our bodies
can turn against us and just look around at all the flammable, sharp-edged,
poisonous, electrified things you see, not counting those heavy or fast-moving
enough to crush us. I'm new to the Final Destination series,
which uses a fairly contrived device involving those who cheated death
getting cheated right back to deliver ghoulish lessons about just how easy
it is for five or six of those dangerous items to gang up in a chain reaction
and cut your head off. Also new to the franchise is 3D, which seems
like a natural for this kind of enterprise, and indeed proves to be the
highlight of the cheerfully idiotic thrill machine The Final Destination.
If you (like me) enjoy yelling “Ohhhhhh!” when a movie character gets sliced
in half by a flying projectile, this is the movie for you. If you're
a fan of characters, plot, and dialog, you should probably look elsewhere
(make it someplace with no loose screws, spilled water, or other implements
of death).
Four
friends attend a NASCAR (never mentioned by name, of course) race:
Nick (Bobby Campo) and his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten) are the
nice ones, Hunt (Nick Zano) is a flamboyant jerk, and Janet (Haley Webb)
wanted to go to the movies instead. I did mention that characterization
isn't one of the movie's strong points, right? OK, so the race doesn't
go well. As in a screwdriver gets dropped on the track, leading to
a chain-reaction car crash that kills dozens in the stands including our
heroes, security guard George (Mykelti Williamson), a mechanic (Andrew
Fiscella), his girlfriend (Stephanie Honore) and Samantha (Krista Allen),
who came with her kids. But wait, it was all in Nick's head, only
then the events start happening from the beginning and he insists that
they all leave. The fuss that kicks up leads to all the people I
mentioned ending up outside the track when the tires and bodies start flying,
except that one of those tires still manages to decapitate the mechanic's
girlfriend. Nick keeps getting visions of deadly stuff, and the survivors
of the racetrack tragedy keep dropping dead. To be more accurate,
they keep dragging, burning and getting sucked through pipes dead.
Nick and Lori Google his psychic visions and find that this sort or thing
has happened before (at least three times, I'd wager). The Internet
tells them what they need to do: break the chain by saving someone's
life. But you know about the stuff you read online: sometimes
that advice on how to stop Death from reclaiming its' own turns out to
be less than trustworthy...
As
the end credits rolled on The Final Destination, I must confess
I had little idea what it was that I had just seen, but I knew I'd enjoyed
watching it. The plot constructed by Eric Bress (who also wrote FD2)
isn't so much a plot at all as the tale of a bunch of people who find themselves
in a movie and are guided by the fact that there've been other movies to
do what the franchise demands of them and nothing more. Also, 1990
called, and it wants his use of the last names of B-movie icons for his
characters back. But he does take the energy he saves by creating
no believable people, situations or lines and goes ape on chain-reaction
mayhem. The way the attempt by a character credited as “Racist” (Justin
Welborn) to burn a cross on George's lawn ends in him getting dragged down
the street by his own truck while he burns alive may seem improbable until
you watch the condensation on a glass of water buy Samantha a near-miss
with a falling ceiling fan by way of an exploding can of hairspray.
Fate, The Final Destination tells us, is like an Evil MacGyver.
David
R. Ellis (who also directed FD2 before his career-defining date
with Snakes on a Plane) doesn't have a lot of luck with the actors
(more on that later), but he embraces Bress's mayhem for all it's worth
and creates an absolutely glorious Pantophobic (yes, Charlie Brown fans,
that IS the Fear of Everything) landscape in which the tiniest object must
be watched closely. Dry that countertop, child-proof those knives
and DO NOT leave stones lying around a lawnmower! Ellis's camera
observes the inanimate objects within the frame with outright suspicion,
and it proves well-founded once those fateful chain reactions get rolling.
In general, his visual palate is nicely bright and cheerful, befitting
a movie that's not really looking to creep viewers out, just to allow us
all to share a good gallows-humored laugh at how we're always one wrong
step away from ending up in a chain e-mail about some poor fool who both
drowned AND got decapitated in the car wash.
But
none of this would work nearly as well as it does without its' good friend
3D. So far, we've mostly watched filmmakers try to class up the RealD
joint by avoiding the conventional “stick in the eye” shocks past generations
of 3D viewers took for granted. Let no one accuse Ellis of such restraint.
Highlighted by that pesky screwdriver making an early assault on the camera,
The Final Destination is chock-full of projectile mayhem breaking
the plane and jabbing at us poor fools in the seats. Nothing is too
quaint for the film to give it a try, not even a shot of a man's
head obstructing a character's view of the action... IN 3D! Another
vaguely creepy observation I'd be remiss not to make is that you can add
the well-photographed skin of the movie's attractive actors and actresses
to the surfaces that look eerily real in the new 3D format. Glass,
liquids, and recently waxed vehicles also put in their usual solid work.
It's a nice touch that the big explosive climax takes place at a mall multiplex
showing a 3D movie (oddly, Renny Harlen's The Long Kiss Goodnight playing
a movie called Love Lies Dying)
Where
we don't get much solid work is out of the cast. Pretty much everyone
here is a relative newcomer, and while they all seem to have a pulse and
Zano is a lot of fun as the preternaturally self-centered Hunt, not one
person in the movie is able to summon a recognizable dimension of humanity.
This may in part be by design: it's a lot less fun to watch someone
you empathize with get hit by a bus. And veterans Williamson and
Allen are no more multifaceted than the kids. Dialog like “That sounds
crazy. Maybe this will help.” does them no favors either. But
however you slice it, having starred in a major motion picture will help
the careers of Campo, VanSanten, et al a lot more with people who haven't
actually seen it.
The
Final Destination is the very model of a modern guilty pleasure:
80 minutes of nonsensical, violent fun shot in state-of-the-art 3D.
Sure, some will no doubt find the whole Final Destination concept
tasteless, but it's nice once in a while to have a good laugh at Death's
expense. Not much else we can do, after all. And that guy who
gets hit by the bus is a real hoot. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm
gonna go triple-check that I didn't leave the oven on. |
