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FINAL DESTINATION 3 (2006) Director: James Wong. Hacktors: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kevin Merriman, Kris Lemche. Rating/5: The lowdown: The first Final Destination films brought a breath of morbid air to the post-Scream teen slasher genre. Seeing groups of kids being creatively slaughtered by an invisible grim reaper, they combined killer jumps with spectacularly gory deaths. The latest sequel attempts to keep up the franchise's grand tradition. This time, it's a girl named Wendy (Winstead) who has a premonition of a fairground rollercoaster disaster. The survivors are then hunted down by death itself in a variety of fashions. Sounds good? Sure does. Yet the Final Destination franchise somehow manages to come unstuck. Good points: The rollercoaster idea is good in theory and the build-up to the actual mayhem is nail-bitingly tense, cleverly making you feel like you're on the 'coaster yourself. There's also a fair bit of gore in the film's second and third acts, despite co-writer and director Wong's recent comments that the violence has been toned down this time (which would've been a bad idea). What we do see is generally very well executed with a nice balance between CG effects and prosthetics. Wong also throws in the odd neat directorial touch, like a transition between two suntan beds and two coffins. Bad points: After endless months of talk about the opening rollercoaster carnage, the actual scene is severely disappointing. There's surprisingly little gore in evidence, and what we do see happens too quickly for the impact to really be absorbed. Sadly, from this point on, the movie largely feels like FD-by-numbers - and the material it does add feels either ludicrous or forced. For instance, there's a whole device of the manner of character's deaths being foreshadowed by elements of photographs Wendy took of them at the fairground (although why death would want to provide our heroine with clues is a mystery). Call me a blind dumb-ass, but half the time I had no idea why Wendy was disturbed by the various photographs. If the film itself was better, it might have been fun to take a better look at the DVD...     One of the few flaws of the second FD movie was the over-complication of death's rules and regulations, which the main characters seemed to figure out all too conveniently. It's the same here, only more so, with unlikely chatter about people intervening into others' deaths, and people being skipped in death's list. There's no way that anyone would buy into that stuff, or even think it, so credibility gets stretched paper-thin during these 90 minutes. FD3 often feels tired, too: every time someone yells, "I'm not gonna die!" after avoiding a would-be demise, you just know what's going to happen in the next second. Add a final sequence which feels rushed and tacked-on (which it was, after test audiences felt the flick ended too soon), and you have yourself a movie which should have been so much better. Overall: While the general production quality has been retained, FD3 is low on ideas and high on formula. If the franchise is to continue, it's time to do new things with the basic concept: literally throw the rule-book away. As it stands, Final Destination has been done to death. Release Date: February 10, 2006. [Reviews Menu] [Home] © Copyright Slasherama 2002-present