Thursday, October 8, 2020

Film Appreciation - A High Velocity Thrill Ride

Cody Hamman rides a rollercoaster of love with 2006's Final Destination 3 for Film Appreciation.

With the first Final Destination film, writer/director James Wong and his writing partner Glen Morgan took ideas presented in an original screenplay by Jeffrey Reddick and reworked them to create a film that was fascinating and fun - and which kicked off a franchise. Wong and Morgan weren't involved with Final Destination 2 because they were busy with a different project, but returned to the franchise for Final Destination 3 and delivered a very solid sequel.

Each Final Destination movie begins with some kind of massive accident; for the first one it was a plane crash, and the second film started off with a multiple car pile-up that was brought to the screen through some very impressive stuntwork. The biggest issue Wong and Morgan had working against them when they made part 3 was that they had to follow up that awesome car crash sequence, and while I like Final Destination 3 overall, I was underwhelmed by the opening accident from the moment I heard what it was going to be. This is not something that ever would have occurred to me for the start of a Final Destination movie: a rollercoaster accident. This isn't an idea Wong and Morgan came up with, either. It was suggested to them by an executive at New Line Cinema. They brought it to the screen in the best way they could, but there was just never any way a rollercoaster accident was ever going to live up to the vehicular mayhem Final Destination 2 showed us.

The rollercoaster accident happens at an amusement park where the graduating class of McKinley High has gathered to celebrate the end of the school year. Among them is heroine Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who Morgan worked with on the Black Christmas remake this same year), who is taking pictures of the students around the park for the yearbook. The pictures Wendy takes become very important to the plot, as they add in the one new twist to the Final Destination formula that 3 has. By examining the pictures she has taken of the other characters, she is able to deduce how Death is going to try to take them out. It's an idea lifted straight out of The Omen.

Death comes after these teens because Wendy has a premonition when she and several others - including her boyfriend Jason Wise (Jesse Moss), best friend Carrie Dreyer (Gina Holden), Carrie's boyfriend Kevin Fischer (Ryan Merriman), jock Lewis Romero (Texas Battle), inseparable airheads Ashley Freund (Chelan Simmons) and Ashlyn Halperin (Crystal Lowe), older creeper Frankie Cheeks (Sam Easton), and edgy couple Ian (Kris Lemche) and Erin (Alexz Johnson) - are about to take a ride on a rollercoaster called Devil's Flight. She sees that the rollercoaster is going to fall apart and go off the rails, she freaks out, she tries to warn everybody, but she only manages to get some of the other passengers off the ride before it rolls along as intended. And crashes. Problem is, everyone was supposed to die like they did in Wendy's premonition, so now Death, represented as a powerful but invisible force that manages to kill people through another series of "accidents", has to clean up this mess and kill the survivors. Those survivors being Wendy, Kevin, Lewis, Ashley, Ashlyn, Frankie, Ian, and Erin... and Wendy's younger sister Julie (Amanda Crew), who also happened to be at the park that night.

While the events of the first movie were important to what happened in the second movie, Wong and Morgan wanted to make this one stand on its own more, and part of their endeavor to make 3 its own movie included leaving out the mortician character Bludworth, who was played by Tony Todd and appeared in both previous films. They did find a way to give Todd a part in the movie, though. In front of the Devil's Flight rollercoaster there stands a giant devil statue, and lines spoken by Todd come booming out of that statue. A Bludworth line is also on a sign at the rollercoaster: "I'll see you soon."

I don't feel that Wong and Morgan made quite as strong of a film with their second try at making a Final Destination. This one kind of feels like it's just going through the motions of the established formula, and the characters and dialogue are weaker than they were in the first movie. Even those characters know that there's a sense of "been there, done that before" here; within the first 30 minutes, before anyone who got off the rollercoaster has even died yet, Kevin has already figured out the whole "Death's Design" thing by doing an internet search and reading about what happened to the survivors of the Flight 180 crash - the plane crash from the first movie. 

Final Destination 3 does have its issues, but the movie is still really entertaining, and the characters aren't too bad, just not as good as the ones Wong and Morgan had written before. My favorites of the bunch aren't given a whole lot of screen time, but they make an impression when they're around. That's Ian and Erin, a cool duo who call each other Pip and Zip, are actually able to have a conversation with Wendy and Kevin about the idea of Death coming after them, which is something most of the other characters aren't smart enough to do, and are usually ready to drop some kind of snarky comment. I have always been a fan of Lemche's performance in the 2000 werewolf classic Ginger Snaps, so I was very happy when I saw him turn up in this Final Destination.

At one point, Ian messes with Wendy and Kevin by putting forth the idea that Death's plans could be thwarted if one of them tries to commit suicide before it's their time to die, according to the order Death is following. He's being a jerk and thinking he's clever, but fans of these movies will know that such a plan wouldn't work. Final Destination 2 already showed us that Death won't allow people to kill themselves out of order. Any attempts to do so will fail. Death is in control.

While the rollercoaster crash doesn't live up to accidents in 1 and 2 for me, Wong and Morgan did come up with some great set pieces that play out as the film goes on and survivors are knocked off. One involving Ashley and Ashlyn in a tanning salon is one of the best and most memorable sequences in the franchise, and another sequence I really enjoy takes place in the hardware store that Ian and Erin work in.

Now I have to go a little further into spoiler territory to say that my biggest gripe with Final Destination 3 is the fact that the ending robs another potential sequel of its opening sequence. Each of these movies should only feature one huge accident so the next installment will have more options, but 3 has huge accident bookends. Death is powerful enough that every one of these movies ends with some kind of "You think you're safe? Think again!" moment, and what shows the remaining characters in this one that they're not safe is a train crash. The last survivors realize they have "coincidentally" all ended up on the same subway train, and then things go to hell... and I really wish they had done something different for the ending of this movie. A train crash could have been the accident at the start of Final Destination 4, 5, 6, whatever, but it was already used by 3, a movie that didn't need to use it. That might be a silly thing to take issue with, but it has always irked me. And when your biggest complaint about a movie is that it tried to throw too much excitement your way, that movie's actually doing pretty well.

The Final Destination series is my favorite horror franchise to be introduced in the 21st century, and I've always appreciated Final Destination 3 for being a good entry in the franchise.

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