James Wong, the director of the original Final Destination, returns with a third installment within the cult horror slasher series sans slasher, the succinctly (however paradoxically) titled, Final Destination 3 (I could permit “Final Destination 2” for it can be argued that since Death is coming around a second time . . . but, a-hem, “3”?), a trite, insulting, mundane effort which mimics the paterfamilias of the series, while depleting the narrative of any artistic sensibility, wry humor, or entertainment, which doesn’t so much as attempt to distinguish itself from its forerunners as it assumes that its audience will content itself with an inferior version of something it’s already paid to see.
[Insert redundantly formulaic plot summary here.]
Wong opens his film by returning to a clichéd cast of teenagers (at least David Ellis, in Final Destination 2, disposed of the genre’s ageism early on . . .), all of which are poor, poor facsimiles of the already faintly drawn caricatures in the original, the worst example being Lewis Romero (Texas Battle), the token black actor which is, not only of the same race, but of the same verbose, pessimistic disposition as Terrence Carson’s character in Ellis’s sequel, Eugene Dix, itself a copy of Kerr Smith’s role as Carter Horton in the original. Sadly, as Ellis unwisely did in Part 2 of the franchise, Wong also forbids his audience to sympathize with his central character after her Cassandra complex is established. However, unlike Final Destination 2, nothing fills the void where anxiety should be, nor are we granted the courtesy of a cursory explanation (which, at least, Ellis humored us with) regarding why Death has reappeared with yet another chip on his shoulder.
Final Destination vainly fails to rise to the all-too-readily superceded expectations of its audience: to merely trump the special effects provided by Ellis’s sequel. As history has proven, if by nothing else than the cavalcade of horror remakes in recent times, surpassing the special effects of yesteryear’s (who’s kidding who? yesterday’s) cinematic outing is easily accomplished if one throws enough money in the special effects department’s direction. However, it seems that the arbitrary genesis for the series’ existence, a mere excuse to have a viscerally-depicted death count, has indeed exhausted itself because we are subsequently bombarded by cliché after genre cliché in the wake of the films’ notorious horrific eye candy.
After proving that he is perhaps the only filmmaker, outside of Eli Roth, working today who is worse at drawing and fleshing out characters, Wong treks through another celebratory event, i.e. Graduation Day, gone wrong as more of the same is issued as a premise. The only new facet of the plot is the surprisingly effective insertion of photographs in which to guide the audience through the various deaths. This method of short-term memory prophesy permits its audience to put its mind on cruise control throughout for we are no longer obligated to even remember what came before because, alas, if we missed it the first time (due, more than likely, to the welcome reprieve of slumber), a visual aide will undoubtedly be forthcoming. Yet, what results is a dilution of suspense for we are left to play a game of “Clue” with the aforementioned photographs as the audience is challenged to guess how the next victim will die.
The only thing more disconcerting than the insulting attitude the filmmakers have toward their audience is the amount of indirect animal cruelty depicted in the film. After a horse is startled into a husking via two M80s, pigeons are killed after finding themselves on the wrong end of a nail gun, and a rat is electrocuted, we are left to wonder if Wong isn’t attempting to recruit a more naïve audience for we watch almost as many animals succumb to the Grim Reaper as we do humans. Perhaps Wong has accepted the fact that we human viewers have long since lost interest.
All of this and blaring incongruities make for one of the worst big-budget horror outings to date. For example, does Wong think (much like Ed Wood) that we won’t notice that a character’s grave, filled only days before, is now plush with green grass or that the film’s opening premonition depicts a camera as the catastrophe’s catalyst, only later to find that the culpable object plays no part in the horrific scenario which follows? Or, worse yet, the non sequitur that the photographs which are provided as ominous reminders were taken before the soon-to-be survivors escape . . . ?
No, no. Wait a minute. Perhaps the latter is merely a clever insinuation that Death intended to look clumsy atop providing himself with something to do between plotting major catastrophes . . . .
Thus Final Destination 3 hopefully ends what began as a fairly entertaining, albeit illogical, escapist horror series, only to digress into unrepentant, poorly made, genre and audience exploitation. The only thing left to consider amid the thoughts of writing James Wong and demanding a refund for his cinematic atrocity is–after preying upon our fears of mass death via the common phobias of exploding airplanes, interstate disasters, and roller coasters mishaps–how the series will inevitably open with Final Destination 4. My humble premonition involves a bridge.
Conversation piece: As with the first two chapters in the trilogy, several characters are named for horror movie directors: “Christensen,” the ever-challenging “Lewis Romero,” the insulting “Jason Robert Wise,” “Freund,” “Halperin,” “Polanski,” and the redundant “Dreyer” (the latter acting as a figurehead that the filmmakers of Final Destination 3 had definitely run out of steam because, alas, they obviously couldn’t think of nary one more horror director in the history of the genre).
-Egregious Gurnow
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