Cody Hamman even has Film Appreciation for his least favorite Final Destination movie.
I'll admit this up front: The Final Destination is my least favorite entry in the Final Destination franchise, and the only one of the five films that I was disappointed with when I walked out of the theatre. That's despite the fact that it was in 3D, which helped it become the highest grossing film in the series. Unlike the previous three movies, this one doesn't bring much in the way of new ideas to the table, it's just an excuse to dazzle the audience with 3D death scenes for 82 minutes - and I would be fine with that if the characters weren't so empty and annoying. Screenwriter Eric Bress had previously brought some similar characters to the series with Final Destination 2, but the character writing got much worse with this one. Also not reaching the level of the work they did on Final Destination 2 was director David R. Ellis. On Final Destination 2, Ellis used his history in the stunt world to deliver the most incredible sequence of the franchise, that opening highway pile-up. With The Final Destination, he gave us the worst opening accident sequence in the franchise, and it's because this one just throws a bunch of CGI nonsense on the screen.
But while I have issues with The Final Destination, I'm also glad it exists, because Final Destination is my favorite new horror franchise of the 21st century and I'm happy to have every movie in the series.
Final Destination started with a plane crash. Final Destination 2 had the aforementioned pile-up. Final Destination 3 began with a rollercoaster accident, something that never would have occurred to me for this series, then wasted a subway train accident on the ending scene when it should have been the start of another sequel. The Final Destination goes even further into territory that I wouldn't have thought of, at least not until we were several more sequels down the line: this one kicks off with an accident at a race track. Apparently the inspiration for this came from a real tragedy, the 1955 LeMans Speedway Disaster. According to Wikipedia, that was what happened when "a multi-car collision launched an engine block, hood, and other wreckage into a packed grand stand, killing 84 people in total. The deaths included spectators being cut in half by the flying hood 'like a guillotine', the engine block crushing a swathe through the crowd; an explosion and fire also occurred, which added to the death toll". That's exactly what happens in this movie, with the old grand stand also crumbling around the characters as debris is thrown at them, but it's not exciting at all because the wreckage and the bloodshed is so CG.
Nick (Bobby Campo) is at the race track with his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten) and their friends Janet (Haley Webb) and Hunt (Nick Zano) when he has a premonition of the disaster that's about to happen. None of those four characters is even remotely interesting, the only standout thing about them is how much of a douche Hunt is, but we're going to be following them through this short movie. While the accident still occurs, the vehicles on the track smashing into each other after a tool from the pit crew is accidentally left on a car and then falls onto the track, Nick's premonition does allow him to save some lives before the wreckage starts flying and the grand stand collapses. Oddly, none of the race car drivers are involved in the story of the film. If I were tasked with making a Final Destination that begins with a disaster at a race track, my first thought would have been to have one of the race car drivers, or at least someone closely associated with them, be the one who has a premonition. That's not the case here, the drivers are not important to the overall film.
Strangers who live because of Nick's premonition but were meant to die in the accident include security guard George (Mykelti Williamson) and a handful of spectators - Samantha (Krista Allen), a mother of two young kids who are not in danger, don't worry; a Cowboy (Jackson Walker); a Mechanic (Andrew Fiscella); and a Racist (Justin Welborn). As you can see, most of these characters have so little impact that they aren't even given names in the credits, which I take as a sign of how little effort Bress seemed to put into the script. The internet will tell you they have names, and a few character names show that this movie stuck to the tradition of naming characters after genre filmmakers (there are surnames like O'Bannon, Milligan, Wynorski, and Cunningham), but that's not so clear in the movie itself.
Allen and Fiscella weren't given a whole lot to do, but Williamson does his best with the material he had to work with and actually succeeds in making his character the one person worth caring about in the movie. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the thoroughly unlikeable Racist, who doesn't do anything but be awful. I did like seeing Dance of the Dead's Welborn in the movie, though.
Noticeably absent from the cast is Tony Todd. After having on screen cameos in the first two movies, Todd only got a vocal cameo in the third, and missed out on part 4 entirely.
Capped off with the sight of a bloody, twitching corpse that's meant to draw laughs, the sequence set at McKinley Speedway lasts just over 11 minutes before the title sequence kicks in. We're back into the movie proper at the 13 minute mark, and just five minutes later we're diving into the first individual death set piece. At 24 minutes, the second individual death set piece is underway. Thanks to an internet search, Nick and his friends know exactly what's happening 30 minutes in. The Final Destination moves along quickly, it knows what the audience wants to see: the invisible force of Death going after people who were meant to die in the opening disaster and knocking them off in jaw-dropping ways. This movie shows just how dangerous things like swimming pool drains, automatic car washes, mall escalators, and Renny Harlin movies (when the 3D movie goes meta and has bad things happen at a screening of a 3D movie) can be if Death is out to get you. A trip to the hair salon is something out of a nightmare, an auto shop seems like a very scary place.
The "McKinley" in McKinley Speedway is a nod to a name used prominently in Final Destination 3, and it's just the first of the nods to things from the films that came before. At one point a character sees a sign promoting Clear Rivers Water, and Clear Rivers happened to be the goofball name of a character from the first two movies. In one scene, a character is talking about déjà vu right when they get taken out in the same way someone was killed in an earlier Final Destination.
The Final Destination doesn't contain much you didn't see in one of the three preceding movies. The only thing that's sort of new here are the premonitions Nick has before each of the individual deaths - and since the images he sees flashes of are presented through the use of some more poor CGI, this addition doesn't do the movie any favors.
This is the dumbest Final Destination movie, or at least it has the dumbest characters, but it feels like it knew how dumb it was. The movie has a sense of humor about itself, it's the sort of movie that can drop the line "I've been trying to kill myself all day!" (the idea that someone can't commit suicide if it's not their turn to die in Death's design is brought back from Final Destination 2) and expect to get a laugh out of it, then have the person that said it play out the entire next scene with a broken noose around their neck, just as a sight gag. The most ridiculous sight gag comes at a construction site that has barrels full of a substance that's not just flammable, they're labelled "Spontaneously Combustible". It seems like a terrible idea to have a spontaneously combustible material around you at any time, but here's a public place full of the stuff. That's a little too much for me.
A lot of The Final Destination is a little too much for me. It's a little too silly, a little too dumb, the effects are a little too bad. But I'm still entertained when I watch it, and I'll take a lesser Final Destination movie over no Final Destination movies, which is what we've been getting since 2011. Hopefully New Line Cinema will make up for this lack of Final Destinations very soon.
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