The Final Destination (aka Final Destination 4) | Horror/Action | rated R (A, L, G) | starring Bobby Campo, Shantel VanSanten, Mykelti Williamson, Krista Allen | directed by David R. Ellis | 1:22 mins
After witnessing a premonition that he and his friends will die in a massive car crash that spirals off the track of a NASCAR race, Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo) panics and forces his friends, girlfriend (Shantel VanSanten, One Tree Hill) and a few bystandards – including a security guard (Mykelti Williamson, Boomtown) and a mom (Krista Allen, Feast) – out of the stadium only to survive that very accident. Soon the survivors start turning up dead in freak accidents and the friends race to keep death from catching up with them.
Unlike New Line Cinema, and most people apparently, I actually prefer the darker, geekier, leaning on atmosphere James Wong Final Destination movies over the light, cheesy, leaning on fun David R. Ellis Final Destination movies. After Ellis made the worst of the series with the messy Final Destination 2 and Wong got it back on track with the very satisfying Final Destination 3, Ellis returns to make the 2nd worst of the series. A senseless, chaotic live-action cartoon where the characters are obnoxious and the deaths are punchlines.
This Destination only proves that 3 sequels deep the series hasn’t changed or evolved in any way. It is fundamentally the exact same story as the original and 4 follows the formula to a T. 1) massive opening death scene for a sudden psychic to escape 2) deaths occuring in which the psychic comes up with the same cockamaimy idea that death has a design and use the same verbage that every character in the previous films had. 3) nearly everyone dies 4) survivors think they are safe, but they aren’t. If you’ve seen any of these movies, and I do highly recommend the first and the third as a bonus, you’ve seen a better version of this already.
Where the Wong films opened with a nightmarish exploration of a common fear (airplane and roller-coaster disasters) and part 2 even worked well (a multi-car highway crash), the opening of 4 is so bizarre and out of left field. Who is afraid of going to a NASCAR race and being squashed by flying debris from a car crash on the track that is so ridiculously big it also takes down half the stadium? Where did this come from? The other big difference are the deaths. As we will all remember, the deaths in the original film were the result of a absurdly complicated Rube Goldberg series of events that turned carelessness with common household items into weapons of death. But in every subsequent film increasingly “Death” has been a more personified force that blows a gust of wind in and pushes the dominos down itself. Or a series of events is set up and something completely random happens instead, cutting all the tension that was set-up with a joke or a visual pun. It feels like a cheat.
I’ll give The Final Destination this. It manages to conquer something that had all the previous films baffled – a good, rousing climax. As random and scattered as it all seems, when the time comes Ellis wrangles it all together in the biggest set piece of the series. Playing into the film’s original 3D release, Destination puts it’s characters in the theater of a 3D movie (that looks an awful lot like The Long Kiss Goodnight) for their final showdown with Death. Finally our hero (Campo) gets to do something heroic instead of come off like a paranoid lunatic. Ellis is actually able to bring the movie to a last second bit of nail-biting tension here. It’s a great finale.
I do like the premise behind this series, but with each installment it refuses to grow. Ellis can splatter the blood at you in a messy, realistic way but doesn’t have a fresh enough take or a strong enough story to overcome the feeling we’ve seen it all before. The biggest cheat of all may be the announcement of Final Destination 5, proving that The Final Destination will not be the final Destination after all.