The Final Destination (3D) (2009)

Let’s begin with an attempt at clarification: The Final Destination (whether seen in two dimensions or three, and trust me, this film is completely worthless without the 3D) should not be confused with the 2000 movie Final Destination. Because that one didn’t have a “The” in the title, see? Totally different film, am I right? Just like this year’s Fast And Furious was totally different from its predecessor, The Fast And The Furious, right? Yeah, right.

Is it just me, or is the Hollywood marketing machine getting really, really lazy about sequel titles? Only a few years ago, the marquees were filled with lengthy, colon-punctuated titles like Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, or even Hot Shots! Part Deux. (The colon in that last title was Charlie Sheen, but I digress.) Nowadays, the titles are reduced to the simplest level: the torture-porn Saw movies just use Roman numerals, like how Chicago has titled their albums for years (they released Chicago XXXII last year — let’s all pray the Saw movies never reach that number). And now they’re just using or unusing articles, the simplest parts of speech. The 2006 movie Final Destination 3 was originally supposed to be in 3D, but they changed it. Now that 3D is in vogue again, they likely figured “Final Destination 4 (in 3D)” would confuse their short attention-span target audience (as well as theater employees who would probably display it on the marquee as “43D” like an assigned plane seat or a weird bra size). So they call this one The Final Destination, and hopefully that extra “The” has the weight and finality of a THE.

Confused? Don’t be. Simply put, it’s a dead-teenager flick in 3D. This movie serves no purpose except to show the grisliest, most violent deaths the filmmakers can conceive, and push them all in your face in full three-dimensional splatter. It has no real plot, a ridiculously dumb premise that lacks all logic by any fantasy or science fiction standards, and one-dimensional characters that exist merely as cannon fodder (or speedway or car wash or escalator fodder in this case). Four “young adults” (acting vaguely like teenagers but played by twentysomethings) who apparently have no last names, jobs, or schools, go to a faux-NASCAR race (more like “an ASSCAR race” in this thing) at a crumbling speedway, when one of them feels a strange wind (yeah, I smelled a strange wind coming off this film) and has a premonition of much grisly death and destruction. I would have too, just by seeing the cracking concrete pillars and broken bleachers that apparently only “our hero” notices. He gets his friends and a few other people out of there — including the typical “lone adult voice of authority who eventually understands their plight,” in this case a speedway security guard (Mykelti “Bubba Gump” Williamson) — just before the carnage really erupts. But of course, now the hero is convinced they’ve all “cheated Death” and now “Death” is seeking them out one by one, in the order our visionary hero saw them die. What passes for dialogue in this movie is completely inane, as the characters toss around the same ridiculously illogical concepts as in the first three films: they were meant to die, “Death” follows a set pattern, and somehow the chain of “Death” can be broken by the hero’s bravery and/or ingenuity. It’s as though the characters don’t realize that death comes to us all eventually — but usually not by being decapitated by a flying stock-car tire.

This movie cannot possibly be taken seriously on any level. It’s all about pointing sharp or heavy things directly at the audience, and the resulting splatter. And there’s a LOT of splatter here, seen right from the beginning with that aforementioned decapitation-by-tire and continuing with lots of fake blood and animal entrails on display in later scenarios involving a swimming-pool pump, a bus accident, and an escalator apparently built with giant leftover gears and parts from industrial road paving equipment. (Actually, the whole damn town seems to be falling apart, as shoddy construction seems to contribute to deathly scenarios at the escalator and the speedway, as well as a hair salon, a car wash, a construction site itself, and even badly anchored construction scaffolding!) This is the kind of movie where a woman who has narrowly avoided several dangerous scrapes turns to her bratty kids and says, “I’ve got my EYE on you two!” and you know exactly what will happen within the next five seconds. Every death sequence sets itself up in a ridiculously far-fetched chain reaction like the “Mouse Trap” game or an old Rube Goldberg invention, and much of it is just groan-inducing, like when an aerosol can of hairspray mysteriously moves by itself across a counter to wedge itself into a hot crimping iron. The hero, at one point, has his arm literally nailed to a wall by a nail gun, impossibly firing repeatedly by itself, and the actor just grunts and strains instead of screaming in agony as any believable person would. And the ending? Let’s just say that although it ties in stylistically to the opening credits in one of several self-references (oh yeah, the climax begins inside a theater showing a 3D movie, wink wink), it elicited as many groans as it did laughs.

Yep, not many screams generated by this movie, mostly laughs and groans, much like director David R. Ellis’s previous theatrical release, Snakes On A Plane, which seems like almost a work of art compared to this one. If you’re really interested in seeing a woman crushed by an engine block and a man luridly julienned by a diamond-shaped fence like a potato through a Vegematic, all I can say is, if you can’t see it in 3D, don’t bother with what I hope is THE FINAL Final Destination.