The Phrase "The Worst Final Destination Movie" Is Completely Devoid Of Meaning
But that's what I would call this movie. Among other things.
You know, I've written a lot over the years about Fellini, Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, Eisensteinian montage, and plenty of other stuff that brandy-sipping intellectuals discuss while they're solving those incomprehensible games of bridge next to the crossword. I only bring this up because the films I've written about most recently seem to include two zombie movies and a straight-to-DVD movie about a haunted abandoned asylum. I am struck by the possibility that something (most likely Alone in the Dark) broke the part of my brain that appreciates things that are good. This creeping suspicion became a sprinting, arm-waving suspicion when I realized that though I've recently watched 21 Grams, I find myself writing about Final Destination 3.
Low-budget horror repeatedly draws to my attention the fact that not one low-budget horror director has ever met a black person (Okay, fine; the guy who did Tales from the Hood). In this case, five minutes in, we are introduced to the Jerry Bruckheimer archetype of the Wacky Black Man.
Pictured: I guess a young black aristocrat from space
Note that he is for some reason wearing a tuxedo and bewildering sunglasses to the amusement park. He is kicking his heels, not unlike he's in a 1940s musical. Later, we get a different Wacky Black Man who delivers deeply textured dialogue like "Man, would you control that bitch?" and "I'm going for 3!" (Apparently he's under the impression that he's playing basketball all the time, even when he's not.) Thanks, hack producers! Thanks for never relenting in your ongoing quest to set mutual human acceptance back twenty years.
In case you're one of those New Yorker-reading bluebloods who's never slummed with the cinematic dregs, here's the formula to every Final Destination movie:
1.) A bunch of horrible characters fire shameful dialogue at one another
3.) One of them is prescient for some reason, and is scared
4.) Instead of dying in some vast improbable accident, they don't
5.) They are therefore dooooomed
6.) Tony Todd is somehow involved
7.) They figure out that they're dooooomed, and come up with a Plan
8.) The Plan is stupid, and fails
The condition of being dooooomed means that they'll all be the victims of complicated fatal accidents even more unbelievable than the initial one that should've killed them. The series of freak accidents always demonstrates that the screenwriters don't have even the most basic understanding of technology or physics, like whoever wrote Live Free or Die Hard (wherein a computer virus can make your hard drive detonate as though it's full of C-4, probably by super-clocking your RAMs).
There's not much to say about the movie itself. Realistically I guess all three of them have been equally bad, but this one's less fun as a bad movie because the absurd chain-of-events death sequences are just dumb and improbable instead of being really long and drawn out (as well as dumb and improbable). Also, this time we only get Tony Todd's voice, so he can't ominously offer some kind of terrible explanation about how you can escape death if you walk backwards when it's Opposite Day.
