The Final Destination

Running Time: An hour and twenty minutes

MPAA Rating: R

What would you do if you could foresee death? Would you accept the inevitable? Hide from it? Pull a complicated theory on “how to cheat death” out of nowhere and watch how miserably it fails? Our hero and seer, Nick, chooses the latter method after predicting a violent incident at an afternoon car race. Since sensationalist journalism apparently doesn’t exist in the Final Destination universe, nobody has heard of eerily similar survivors’ experiences involving plane, coaster train, and automobile accidents. I suppose a crowd avoiding their demise by dissipating at any mention of somebody’s “vision” wouldn’t make for enthralling horror, but neither does saving a few people to be killed off one by one in the same manner as every other film in the series.

Unlike the other movies, the main premonition of an accident and its subsequent fulfillment are rushed through like the opening of a television show. There is no suspense or ominous buildup, just explosions, death, and déjà vu to precede the opening credits and to let the audience know how little innovation they’ll be witnessing in the next hour. Each character even blatantly rips-off their persona from somebody in the first three films, and not very well at that.

Fans of the series may enjoy this installment in the same way Saw fans like watching a new version of the same movie every year. There are more guts, deaths, and some gimmicky 3D shots to distract from the lack of coherent storytelling or character development, but pulling further away from the plot that made the first movie interesting just leaves viewers with a sense of unfulfillment.

In many ways, The Final Destination is just a sub-par rehash of its predecessors, which is a shame considering the potential of the series. Real-life events involving people dying shortly after surviving other dangers have come to be known as “Final Destination stories” and the movie could have used the depth gained by having slightly more realistic scenarios. This is supposedly the last film in the series that gets worse with each new addition, though anybody who follows the scary movie genre has heard that before. Nothing was explained or added in this movie, so one can only hope that the eventual reboot or sequel will try a bit harder to capture the originality that made the series popular in the first place.

Actual Rating: NC-17 Nobody is going to win a parent of the year award by letting their kids watch somebody be disemboweled in a pool, but letting them see a mother de-brained by a rock in front of her children is just disturbing. There are fewer cut-away shots than in the first three movies, and even some prolonged views of organ heaps. Oh, and there are boobs, because those are obviously the worst things your kids could see in a movie.

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