The Final Destination (2009)

by Devon Gilbert

I definitely don’t love the Final Destination series, but I still find them enjoyable.  They really were never about story and character, though you might be able to argue that the first one had some of both.  Instead they featured really cool death scenes (the opening car crash scene in Final Destination 2 being my personal favorite) at a pretty good pace.  Based on that criteria, I thought that The Final Destination was very entertaining, though technically it might be the worst of the series.  I find it tough to tell because two of the movie’s best assets, 3-D home viewing and its incredibly short runtime (I believe the end credits start before the 80min mark), have really nothing to do with talent.

The plot of this movie is pretty much exactly the same as the other three in the series.  This time the initiating incident is a car race, and the person with a premonition is Nick O’Bannon (played by unknown Bobby Campo.)  As anyone familiar with the series knows, Nick has a long premonition in which he sees many people die (including himself, his girl, and his friends) due to a mammoth car crash and the instability of the stadium.  Of course, Nick gets his crew out just in time to escape the predicated disaster.  So as usually, Death picks them off one by one in the order they died in Nick’s premonition.

For me it goes without saying that the characters are insignificant.  I would have been shocked if they were well drawn, and given the content of the movie, I would have been disappointed if they were.  I liked that The Final Destination gets right down to the point.  The movie moves from death scene to death scene with very little filler in-between.  The death scenes themselves are entertaining but certainly not groundbreaking.  There is much more of a reliance on “paranormal activity” in this entry, which didn’t really bother as much as it will some people.  On average the deaths weren’t the most creative in the series, but they were clever enough to pass the time.  I also wouldn’t describe this movie as violent and/or gory, but it earns its R rating.  Overall, this movie chose quantity of deaths over quality of deaths, which makes for faster pacing but also means nothing memorable happens.

The 3-D element of the movie is really what makes the movie good despite its flaws.  Since it’s so rare to be able to watch a 3-D horror movie at home, I think The Final Destination benefits from being one of those few.  I guess the 3-D element makes the deaths creative.  For instance, some deaths are shown in “X-Ray” vision, an effect that was cool in 3-D but would probably look cheap in 2D.  And make no mistake, the makers of The Final Destination milk the 3D for all it’s worth.  It is clearly a gimmick in this movie, with planks getting upturned and metal shrapnel shooting forward, as opposed to Avatar which has none of the traditional 3D gimmicks.  But even as a gimmick, it works (at least until there are tons of 3D movies you can watch at home, which would make The Final Destination’s best asset seem old.)

As a solid good movie, The Final Destination fails.  As the forth entry in a decent horror series, The Final Destination is okay.  As a 3D horror movie, The Final Destination is good solid fun.

The Final Destination:  B