For those who aren’t privy to my Facebook and Twitter rants, my last non-family related vacation was invaded by the filming of what at the time was called Final Destination 4 (in 3D!). It effectively shut down half of Universal Studios, and it became nearly impossible to figure out how to get where I wanted to go. Needless to say, I treated the crew to a death glare as I tried to calm down over a turkey sandwich.
All right. In keeping with the latest of film fads, the installment was renamed “The Final Destination.” The. That means it’s the only one, right? Well, since there have already been three, each more awful than the last, “The Final Destination” should be the end of the series. Oh, let it be so.
I forced myself to sit down and view this film when it came on demand to my cable company. I will describe it here so that you may satisfy your curiosity without subjecting yourselves to its soul-crushing awfulness.
It’s a Final Destination movie, so there has to be a big accident in the beginning. And everybody’s gonna die. How do they kill off the cast this time? Well, after some very ridiculous attempts at “character introduction,” everyone is impaled, crushed, or otherwise killed when a NASCAR race somehow goes awry (after the Annoying Bad Hair Guy of the group of friends mentioned that he only goes to races to see crashes – ha ha ha, Final Destination. Ha). The Sympathetic Caring Boyfriend gets the vision this time, and thanks to him, Cheesy Girlfriend, Annoying Bad Hair Guy, and Probably the Slut are spared along with Cowboy, Angry Nazi, Nazi’s Wife, some couple with kids, and Black Security Guard. Well, okay. To be fair, it’s a little more original…Nazi’s Wife gets smashed by a flying tire after they think they’re all safe.
I watched this in 2D, but it’s very obvious that it was meant for 3D shocks and blood spatters. It’s simply another excuse to beat, impale, and set fire to the dead horse that is tortureporn under the guise of continuing what started as a tolerable movie concept.
This one starts off a little like the very first Final Destination. People are weirded out that Sympathetic Caring Boyfriend saw what was going to happen, and at the memorial service everyone decides to stop by and ask him how he knew. Oh, and Nazi Guy gets to drop some N-bombs just so that we’ll hate him a little more. Then come various “ominous” happenings…and because he’s now the most-developed character in the film, Angry Nazi has to die. Just in case we don’t hate him enough, he dies after getting drunk, listening to death metal, and then deciding to erect a flaming cross on Black Security Guard’s front lawn…resulting in some strange tow truck accident that somehow gets him burned alive while being dragged down the street. I see what you did there, Final Destination. A veritable Aesop’s fable. Hooray.
Cue the played out Final Destination plotline: survivors continue to perish one by one. In this film though, the filmmakers decide to make the deaths as graphic and juicy as possible, and believe it or not, they manage to make the “foreshadowing” even more painfully blatant. Even better, Death has now developed powers greater than the mere “unlikely series of events” or “conveniently placed breeze.” Death is now telekinetic, capable of making cans of hairspray drag across flat tabletops for absolutely no reason.
At any rate, I could continue with a blow-by-blow of gory deaths, but the plot pretty much follows the others. The only difference is that Sympathetic Caring Boyfriend figures it out a little more quickly than anyone in the previous films did, so on with the show of attempting to cheat death some more!
With extra blood and guts. I cannot emphasize that enough. Did these filmmakers not get the memo that the tortureporn fad mercifully ended years ago? What possessed someone to smash together that dated fad with the new Hot Movie Gimmick of 3D?
Other points of blood and guts “originality” include a death similar to something found in a Chuck Palhanuik story, (if anyone besides me remembers the story of the kid who liked to sit on the grate at the bottom of his pool), a guy who’s actually okay with the idea of dying, and an attempted suicide….or rather, a series of failed attempts at suicide, and an attempt at a joke about three-dimensional films.
This plot manages to seem even more half-assed than Final Destination 3, if one can comprehend such a thing. In fact, it’s so half-assed that I can’t even properly describe it without wandering around like an out-of-town drunk in the French Quarter. Please, people, don’t let my sacrifice be in vain. Do not subject yourselves to this travesty of “entertainment.”