Like poor Belial in Basket Case, The Final Destination film franchise doesn’t get the love and respect it deserves. Originally written as an episode of The X-Files by Jeffrey Reddick, the story was fleshed out as a full-fledged movie. Reddick was inspired by a news story he read about a mother who warned her daughter who was on vacation not to take a specific flight back home as she has a “bad feeling” about it. The plane did indeed crash as the mother had predicted.
Final Destination set itself apart from the reboots, flood of J-horror remakes and the “torture horror” that saturated the market at the time by depicting its death as a force of nature driven by fate. No one can escape their destiny when the sand in the hourglass runs out. Starting with Alex Browning in the original film, many characters throughout the franchise try to reroute, delay or even evade their destinies with limited success and varying results.
With each film introducing a new cast to feed to the reaper, the one re-occurring character is William Bludworth played by horror icon Tony Todd. As a mortician and owner of the Bludworth Funeral Homes, Bludworth is portrayed as a death guru, an authority on the force, the teens turn to for advice and guidance. Word is that the upcoming Final Destination Bloodlines will delve into his background.
The series is also known and respected for its incredibly inventive kills and approaching teens like celebrated filmmaker John Hughes did in that they speak and act like real human beings in the Final Destination films not like caricatures or stereotypical adolescents.
The one that started a cinematic chain reaction. High school student Alex Browning and his classmates are heading to Paris, France, for a school trip when he has a horrifying vision of the plane exploding on takeoff. His panic causes a commotion. Alex, other students and a teacher disembark, are booted off the plane. Minutes later, Alex’s premonition comes true to the shock of them all. The group are thankful they have cheated Death at first but…Death don’t play that. Each of the survivors suffer what appears to be very bizarre, tragic accidents.
With the help of the local mortician (Tony Todd as the re-occurring William Bludworth) Alex and fellow survivor Clear Rivers (scream queen Ali Larter from House on Haunted Hill, Resident Evil: Extinction, Resident Evil: Afterlife and TV’s Heroes and Landman) attempt to puzzle out Death’s grand design before it is too late.
Final Destination presented something different and that caught the eye of not just rabid horror fans but also casuals who enjoyed more mainstream offerings at the time like Scream, Urban Legends and Blair Witch. Destination rolled the dice and dared to be unique and that paid off despite the film and the series not getting the recognition it deserves over the years for its story but also its mind-blowing kills.
This sequel is worth watching just to check out the amazing highway pile-up, car crash scene itself. If that doesn’t blow your mind nothing will. Another group of teens is heading off for Spring Break but their road trip ends before it begins due to the aforementioned insane fender bender. Ali Larter returns as Clear Rivers. She is tracked down by this movie’s version of Alex in Kimberly Corman (A. J. Cook) whose really, really bad parking on an on-ramp saves a bunch of lives…for the time being. It is revealed that Alex was killed by…Get this…a falling brick. No, I am not kidding. That’s how our hero from the first movie bit the dust.
This follow-up introduces the notion that perhaps by introducing a new life, as one of the survivors is pregnant, Death’s design can be thwarted. Almost as good as the original except the dialogue at times is very clunky and the plot is simultaneously clever and braindead after the big opening for those who care about such things in a movie where people are getting crushed, impaled, sliced to pieces by barbed wire and incinerated into ashes.
This is where things start to decline especially when it comes to the changes to the original blueprint of the series. This time it is a tragic roller coaster ride that sets Death’s murder spree into motion with budding journalist Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) picking a fight with The Grim Reaper and save the other survivors. The movie borrows a plot point from J-horror classic Shutter with Wendy noticing a vital clue. The photos she has taken reveal who might be next on the hit list which is a new twist to the series. It is not a really a welcome one as all it does it promote really lazy storytelling to set up the next big kill. Speaking of really lazy storytelling…
It may have made the most money of any Final Destination movie, probably because it was released in 3-D, but the fourth follow-up is set on cruise control from the opening sequence at a NASCAR race, without much creative inspiration at play. A rack track tragedy has our hero Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) and his girlfriend Lori Milligan (Shantel VanSanten) bumbling and stumbling around the fictional town of McKinley, Pennsylvania, trying to assist others in cheating death. The plot is about as elaborate as the last text you got. Instead of writing smart ways for Nick to be warned about the upcoming calamities, he just has visions or dreams filled with symbolic objects like swinging hooks and gas tanks, which probably looked good in 3-D, instead. He and his Scooby Gang, whomever is still left alive, go from set-piece to set-piece, kooky death after kooky death, without any hinderances like a plot to get in their way. The entire phoned-in, derivative endeavor is about as formulaic as any sitcom plot from the ’90s.
A wild accident (a bridge collapse) gets the ball rolling.
Check.
Bizarre deaths ensue.
Check.
Someone attempts to decode Death’s blueprint.
Check.
Tony Todd makes a guest appearance offering cryptic warnings and advice.
Check.
A seemingly soothing ending in which the final girl(s), boy(s) celebrate outwitting Death only to be proven wrong.
Check.
The producers sleepwalk through yet another transparently formulaic entry in the franchise?
Check.
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