Kelly Wand"The Final Destination" review
September 11th 2009 07:25
Been on that date.
I know, I know…I really should be writing my Inglourious Basterds review, not least because A) I saw it first and 2) it’s actually worth writing about. But I’m afraid very afraid that all the many ways in which FD43D irritated me will fade from memory like toothache pain within the next few hours, leaving me unable to recall all the slipshod ways in which it sucked and thus unable to blog exhaustively about them. It seems, annoyingly, that my prolificity is directly proportional to my annoyance.
And no movie in a long time has annoyed me quite like The Final Destination -- mainly because the first movie in the tetralogy was so evocative, inventive, and spookily cool.
It had characters I could believe in, reacting strongly and convincingly to unusual, inescapable catastrophes. It gracefully wedded metaphysics and questions of free will to a traditionally witless genre, wittifying it. It gave a shit about details. The studio and the title both claim that this is the “final” Final Destination movie, which if true (it’s been #1 in the U.S. two weeks in a row, so maybe they just mean the last sequel before the inevitable “reboot”) makes it the crummiest series finale this side of Alien Resurrection. Maybe even AfterM*A*S*H.
Purportedly the director, David R. Ellis (the guy who did the sporadically more watchable second one), signed on because he was “intrigued” by the visual potential of 3D deaths. I’m increasingly convinced that 3D is officially Hollywood’s new crutch. The effect is repetitive and limiting -- every punchline is something sharp or glistening abruptly jutting at you -- and it doesn’t help that most of the money shots in this installment are shamelessly recycled. Improbably slothful screenwriter Eric Bress conveys the sense that omnipotent Death is far less a threat than the massive number of improbably slothful construction workers, hospital interns and maintenance people who do most of Death’s heavy lifting throughout the movie. There’s a potentially great drinking game here; just hoist your mugs every time something spills or a negligent laborer goes on lunch-break.
The movie sticks to the now tired, established pattern: unprepossessing teenager inexplicably has premonition of disaster (this time at a NASCAR race, which bears a depressing resemblance to the second movie’s infinitely awesome-r highway collision opener), saves a small group of people as the result of his panicky outburst, and then they all die one by one in convoluted ways despite repeated, unsuccessful last-second rescue attempts by the main character and his mate, generally right after the victim saying something ironic or smiling cheerfully about a near miss. There’s not one surprise throughout.
And ZERO enlargement of the series lore. Even after four movies, we still don’t know why random kids are having these ultimately futile premonitions (is some other benign force opposing death and transmitting them?) or why Death’s so inept – why doesn’t he just send a meteor down and take them all out? Or just give them cancer or heart attacks? Why’s he always need to resort to appliances and wind? Also, if the survivors have to die in a certain order, isn’t the sequence already permanently screwed up from the hundreds of deaths killed in the original “accident”? At least in the second movie, there was a cursory explanation that those characters had to die because they had all by chance survived the “paradoxes” created by ripples in the first movie; so is that continuity-wise still what’s going on? In fact, whatever happened to the two main characters who (uniquely) survived FD 2? For the first time in the series, Tony Todd’s character isn’t on hand to explain the “rules”. Instead, a black homeless guy with a less creepy voice shows up periodically and says cryptic stuff about being in “the right place at the right time”. (You know that he’s Death, or at least oracular, because he’s black. And a transient.)
The cast is the usual bland assortment of hotties with few defining characteristics besides their hair color/shape. There’s a dick character, a pretty girl, another pretty girl, and a nice, handsome, boring guy who has the premonitions and dreams that even his close friends refuse to put credence in no matter how many times in a row he’s right. He also tends to get them just as it’s too late to do anything about it, so what’s the point? Whatever unspecified force is sending these “clues” seriously needs to find a better delivery method. This time instead of being imbedded in photographs or window-reflections, they’re just twirling 3D montages of symbolic imagery that only make (vague) sense after the fact (how is a poor teenage psychic supposed to get “ambulance” out of entwined cobras?).
As usual, instead of all sticking in a room together and being careful, the characters continually split up and try to call each other on cell phones at the last minute while they drive across town at high speeds (which is of course perfectly safe for them due to Death’s immutable but paradoxically constantly amended “design”). Where in the first movie, the main character’s premonition of a plane crash understandably aroused the suspicion of FBI agents and the supernatural dread of his peers, there’s no legal fallout or remotely nuanced reaction from anyone this time around. You’d think it would be national news if for the FOURTH time in a decade, some kid had a premonition right before a major disaster and turned out to be right, but nobody cares. As in Jumper, passersby never register anything bizarre happening right in front of them or notice people dying slowly in plain view in broad daylight, whether in a public car wash or crowded, draining swimming pool. (They’re probably thinking, “That must be one of those doomed Final Destination characters from that NASCAR debacle; guess we’ll come back later.”)
The movie doesn’t even rip off its predecessors properly. Amanda Detmer’s iconic death by bus in the first movie was pitch-perfect film-making; director James Wong claimed that after seeing it preview audiences were so vocal, he had to insert a long, deliberately sluggish scene of Devon Sawa mixing Alka-Seltzer because ensuing dialogue kept getting drowned out. The reason it’s so effective is the meticulous misdirection of the set-up: Seann William Scott’s dumbass nearly gets splattered by Kerr Smith in his car, then Smith and Devon Sawa’s character’s quarrel bitterly on the street-corner about the nature of fate. There's a lot going on all at once. Amanda Detmer’s barely in the shot…Finally she gets mad at both of them, tells them to DFD, and WHAM. Even Wong concedes the sheer implausibility that Detmer’s character wouldn’t see or hear an oncoming bus, but that’s part of what makes it eerie: maybe Death screwed with her peripheral vision and hearing. It was an ingenious bit, copied and parodied dozens of times over the course of the series but never once equaled in sheer compositional nigh-Hitchcockian elegance.
Nine years later in FD4, an ambulance arbitrarily broadsides Forrest Gump’s Mykelti Williamson. Twice. No one even grieves for him (standing right beside him and nearly a victim himself, the main character’s first and only response is to realize he has to get across town to prevent another incident…again). In fact, no one in this movie grieves ever, despite witnessing multiple horrific accidents, or worries much that they’re living in a city held together purely by chickenwire and papier-mache. Or that the title of the 3D movie-within-the-movie they're about to die at is flagrantly ungrammatical.
They even ruined the theme music.
I was uniformly mocked by my seatmates for expressing dismay that a great paean to paranoia like the first FD had been reduced to this boring formulaic retread; what did I expect? Uh, how about a single twist? Like, what if all or some of the characters were really old and/or terminally ill anyway? Or kids? Or pregnant? Or Unbreakable? Or the movie was set in another time period? Here’s a pitch that I proffer to New Line gratis: a tie-in sequel to Titanic featuring the Gloria Stuart/Kate Winslet character, who’s been resourcefully dodging Death lo these many decades ever since she survived Death’s crafty iceberg…
Check, please.
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