THE FINAL DESTINATION
2009
Directed by David R. Ellis
Written by Eric Bress
There are indications that Final Destination 3 was contemplated as the last of the series; after all, if the Final Destinations teach us anything, it's that nothing lasts forever, and in the mid-00s it wasn't yet expected that they must, lest the entire industry of cinema collapse. Until the second sequel, the series had been following the conventional trajectory: the second Final Destination made noticeably less than the first, so it was a good bet that Final Destination 3 would further gently decline. It'd been budgeted lower, and originally they even had an ending to tie up the franchise's loose ends, placing Final Destination 2's pair of series-defying survivors on that train with Wendy, though this was abandoned with a shrug when the actors' schedules failed to line up—and I'll agree, it's not hugely important, but it's a bummer, since their survival remains one of the franchise's most conceptually-aggravating errors. But, of course, it was not the end: Final Destination 3 exceeded expectations, and inevitably the series' producers—though they've been the franchise's single constant, I've neglected to name Craig Perry and Warren Zide till now—asked themselves, "why not a fourth?", which is a completely reasonable question, in the abstract.
So, now I'm speculating (even if it seems like it should be ascertainable, I can't track down much production history for this fourth film), but they must've thought this would be the last. They were even being nice, intending it as a deferred fulfillment of James Wong's dashed hopes to have done a 3-D third installment—I'm somewhat convinced that the budget increase here, to $40 million, still doesn't even capture the entirety of the 3-D overhead—though it's hard to see it as anything besides a bust-out, one more sequel to monetize the renewed attention, and a 3-D movie to exploit the 3-D boom going strong here in 2009. So, guiltily, they shrouded their vulgar motivations with that damnable title, The Final Destination. As if The Final Destination were the culmination of all Final Destinations, the best, the most, the capstone to the phenomenon; or, alternatively, it's much, much dumber than that. It's a New Line release, after all, the company that gave us both Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare and Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday, but Final Destination, why, it already has the word "final" in it, so you can see how they strained themselves figuring it out. Hence The Final Destination—I believe the very first usage of that confusing and hideous naming convention—followed up, only two years later, the single shortest span between any two entries in this franchise, with Final Destination 5. Meanwhile, in the DVD set I own, The Final Destination has been rebranded on the disc "Final Destination 4," because, yeah, that's all it ever was.
Even that might be overselling the most uninspired and product-like of the series—as long as we're having fun with English language determiners, forget "The Final Destination," it's less even A Final Destination than it is Some Final Destination—and this is probably something you already knew, as the only accurate usage of the definite article here would be in the phrase, "the worst Final Destination." But one can, even so, find it disappointing (if nothing else, it annoyingly has the best poster). Wong had bowed out—he was unfortunately going on to bigger things, namely dropping such a big nuke on his career with the infamous American live-action adaptation of Dragon Ball that he's barely even been a TV producer in the years since—but David R. Ellis, of Final Destination 2, was back in, and Ellis had every bit as much right as Wong, if not more, to be called the inventor of the Final Destination style, so the series' grim delights seemingly remained in capable hands. The screenplay, while I suspect it was ready some time before Perry and Zide ever greenlit the continuation, and not finessed afterwards, was itself a product of 2's co-writer, Eric Bress. However, as he's working solo here, I wonder if it's not too much to make some assumptions about what his colleague J. Mackye Gruber was in charge of on 2 (death sequence ideas, complications regarding the rules of Death, interseries continuity) and what Bress did (everything else, and I leave it as an exercise for you to determine what "else" there was). Uniquely, it was shot in Lousiana and Alabama. Perhaps something about the morbid atmosphere of, er, Canada—I'm being partway serious—is crucial to these films. It also made shooting a tad more expensive, which means more of that $40 million got eaten up with things not critical to the mission.
So, even if it wasn't, it feels like a bust-out, and in an effort to disguise its nature (maybe they even fooled themselves) for a little while longer, the one thing here doing anything to justify that title is the title sequence, which I'd credit to somebody if the movie did, though it might've been Ellis's idea, given that he returns to it in a halfway-cool callback at the denouement. The notion's neat: reinventing a selection of the previous Final Destinations' kills via a hybrid of medical imagery and schematic-like animatics, and I think we could probably agree that a more austere approach would've been better (maybe lose the animatics and stick to mocked-up medical and investigative photography), but that would've been harder, and, perhaps, not even that "Final Destination" of it. Either way, it's expressly meditating upon the franchise's legacy, though it'd have been nice if the movie was either about that legacy, or lived up to it. (It's also difficult to firewall thoughts of Final Destination 5, which was compelled to repeat the concept in its title sequence, because it did do something with the franchise's legacy.) As for how "Final Destination" it ultimately feels, we have the first title sequence without Shirley Walker's pensive scoring. She's been replaced by Brian Tyler, offering some kind of numetal-ish style, which isn't even inappropriate for its purposes, but Walker was one of the last people involved still at the work keeping the Final Destinations tethered to anything serious. And, remember, I'm still discussing one of the movie's best parts.
I have, however, misled you: in a structural upset, the titles actually come after the opening sequence (like a James Bond). I could be snarky, and say "that's The Final Destination's idea of 'creativity,'" but that might be underrating its deleterious effect; the titles are substantially delayed, but I wonder if there remained a psychic pressure to get to it (the whole movie is an even-shorter-than-customary 82 minutes), because the characteristic two-step opening sequence is the series' very shortest, only 11 minutes, which means essentially zero minutes to get settled into our characters' dynamic (we'll see that may be the least-bad of our options) before getting wrenched into supernatural horror.*
So: this time the template is filled out with [a stock car race], and, as if to confirm my supposition that Bress's job on Final Destination 2 was to write the 00s horror douchebag dialogue parts, our very first exchange in The Final Destination is Hunt (and fuck you twice; Nick Zano) arguing that the sole appeal of such an event is to see a horrible, life-ending wreck, even doing this in the douchiest manner available to an actor who'd have to fight a little against his physicality already, to not come off like the douchiest fratboy douche. Immediately following, there's an immortal bit about tampons.
With Hunt are Lori and Janet (Shantel VanSanten and Haley Webb), babes, and Lori's boyfriend and our prophet du jour, Nick (Bobby Campo); independently, we also have security guard George (Mykelti Williamson), mom Krista (Samantha Lane) and her husband and children (none of whom are part of Death's design, so whatever), mechanic Andy (Andrew Fiscella) and his girlfriend Nadia (Stephanie Honore), a tow truck driver credited as "Racist" but named Carter (Justin Welborn), plus his wife (who dies presently, so also whatever). Ellis does effective suspense with a domino-like series of innocuous accidents that puts a piece of metal onto the track, resulting in one of those horrible, life-ending wrecks Hunt was after, and, unsurprisingly, the chain-link fence proves to not be sufficient protection for the crowd, though it would probably have mitigated matters somewhat if the drivers actually stopped or slowed down. Now a big section of the archaic stands collapses on our victims, whereupon Nick wakes up and preserves the ten lives (the eagle-eyed will notice this makes another "it's not entirely uncreative within the limitations of the Final Destination formula" gesture) Death had claimed as its own, and their struggle to stay alive begins. They're already losing: in a third novelty, Nadia is eliminated before the opening sequence is actually over, a wheel being catapulted off the track and splattering her all over the parking lot.
So let's not condemn it for having no new ideas, but even for a Final Destination in 2009, this is one explicit "and here's some worthless fucking meatbags to watch die" narrative, with Hunt achieving the status of the film's defining personality through pure defect—the most likeable thing he ever does is rough up a child, because at least the child had it coming, but then, so does Hunt, and the sensation of Bress's evil pleasure at making you wait for his elimination is palpable—but Hunt is almost inevitably preeminent over our "core" cast of twenty-somethings, who, otherwise, feel like nothing but free-floating manifestations of a horror film's requirement for twenty-somethings to kill. They're inexplicable as "friends" (I'd assumed that Hunt was at least Janet's boyfriend, but careful reading of the film makes this pretty impossible), or as figures integrated into the world, devoid of families, jobs, classes (or frats!), recognizable traits, anything, except that Lori and Nick live together, which seems more like an excuse for VanSanten to wander around the room in her panties while we talk about Death, not something I'd necessarily even complain about if a bare minimal effort had been put into making VanSanten's ass human.
The rest are, at least, typed, though "racist" and "mom" aren't much to hang your hat on, and die too early to engage with the plot anyway (in the latter case, "whole family" was possibly considered too hardcore, though I have suspicions it was simply considered too much work); George is the only vaguely personalized character, a recovering alcoholic responsible for his family's deaths and therefore ambivalent towards his own, which amounts to the funny-in-theory concept of George attempting to repeatedly kill himself while Death refuses to permit it, but as a practical matter the joke barely reads, because we aren't seeing it, only arriving at the tail end when Nick and Lori find him on his last attempt. Perhaps it says something about the flatfooted dumbfuckness of the script and production to note the following: it has that semi-major character with a name credited as "Racist," though this could've easily referred to the other racist, that one being a cartoonishly-dickheaded hospital patient yelling at his Asian orderly about how the latter is against him because he killed so many "of [his] kind" in the Korean conflict, whereupon the orderly sarcastically retorts "I'm Chinese," and you can almost perceive the nervousness of both featured extras radiating through the screen as they mutually wonder, "should we tell them?"
I harp on the crappiness of the connective tissue (practically just interstitial fluid) between the death sequences, because it's the easiest thing. Obviously it's not the most important thing. And yet: while any Final Destination, by virtue of being a Final Destination, retains some brutish watchability, this one tempts fate with its franchise's worst deaths. There's the whole overarching problem here, of being so excessively indebted to CGI, something made clear almost instantly, as vehicular stunts coexist unhappily with shimmering digital debris flying at the camera and at our principals. A shocking amount of it comes off like a YouTuber—possibly a YouTuber in 2009—dropping composited still-renders of weightless, dimensionless "car parts" and "concrete" on sacks of gleaming robot blood, sometimes cutting to a practical, as with Nadia, but not even usually. This is CGI from the year Avatar came out, mind you.
I've never had the opportunity to see this in 3-D; it's conceivable the format partially redeems the behind-the-times tech. But I doubt it, so while there's nothing wrong with a Final Destination being tacky with 3-D, it's not helping it feel more visceral. (3-D is also a big part of Nick's wretchedly-terrible, mystery-obliterating visions, which approach the level of the CGI you'd find in an unknown cartoon discovered in a Walmart bargain bin in 2009.) The cooler part is that our finale takes place in a 3-D screening at a theater under renovation, which is a subject of visual and even metacinematic fun, groping around the theater showing the all-but-unidentifiable fuzzball that any 3-D movie would be sans glasses**, the only recognizable things being movie bombs presaging the "real" explosions Death is about to send straight through the (our?) screen. (I also enjoy the old joke about mutiplexes made thrilling when Nick's quest to save Lori is stymied by every theater playing the same Goddamn movie.) But it swerves us back into "flatfooted dumbfuckness" when Nick initially begs off the screening because the 3-D movie, called Love Lays Dying, "sounds like a chick flick," purely because Lori unaccountably didn't spend one second correcting him, or, alternatively, she believed this to be the case herself, and didn't find the idea of e.g. Failure To Launch (sounds like a space movie) in 3-D to be curious.
More than that, though, there's just less verve and complexity. Carter's is probably the most "creative," albeit to the side of "anything to do with being in a Final Destination movie," inasmuch as it's politically ironic and mortifyingly tasteless: Death catches up with Carter as he attempts to burn a cross on George's lawn, blaming the black security guard for his wife's demise, and he gets caught on his burning tow truck in a way overtly referential to the 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr. It's tasteless with its heart in the right place, at least, though it's also remarkably one-note—it just kind of happens, without much build-up—which is strategic, with a character this vile, but it's not even the laziest kill in the movie, which belongs to Andy, who works at a car shop that should be the site of all manner of squirmy suspense, and instead it's barely even two beats' worth of it, and it's sole thought is to get to the (CGI, and in such small portions) gore effect of Andy's torso getting shoved in diamond chunks through a fence. Lori (in the film's second "timeline," of three) is eaten by a broken escalator, and that's kroovy, but clumsy—she's spewing blood from her mouth already, when the escalator has, at present, only started chewing on her ankle. The secret tenth victim (Jackson Walker) essentially just has a ceiling dropped on him, and it's not great that this nothing of a death is probably the film's single most persuasive effect.
This isn't reckoning with the ones that are basically repeats, most noticeably with George, run down by an ambulance in a carbon copy of Terry's previously-funny demise in the first film, initially without its comedy, or its anything else (George's death's primary value is that, initially being part of another of Nick's visions, we do get some interesting somber fatalism when Nick loops back to right before the ambulance hit him). Krista's is a special case, because at least it's riffing, and on its merits, it's probably The Final Destination's best death: she goes to the hairdresser and God knows there's plenty there to be frightened of—it's certainly the film's most sustained "behold! the laws of physics" sequence—but it's a total misdirect, and while the setting is cosmetically different the precise rhythms feel a little too similar to the last time Ellis misdirected us this hard, when he squashed Tim at the dentist's back in Final Destination 2, plus it's not hammered home that it was essentially Krista's own kids who killed her, with their dipshittery, while in 2, Tim was the kid, so it was more emotionally savage. Meanwhile, the best-remembered death here belongs to Hunt, who has (the only spoiler redaction worth making here!) his guts ripped out of his butthole by the action of a pool pump. I adore the crassness, but the execution is more demure than the concept demands—especially because the concept arguably bears the least connection to reality of anything in the entire franchise—and it would also feel too simple, if it weren't being cross-cut with Janet being trapped in a demoniac car wash, which is The Final Destination's best "okay-it's-actually-kinda-scary" thriller scene, except she doesn't die in it.
It's two bad currents running headlong into one another: a downright dysfunctional eagerness to make a Final Destination streamlined down to its most lizard-brained appeal, colliding with filmmakers who'd lost touch with the baroque and macabre imagination that had always bolstered the crude facade. So the facade alone remains, modestly renovated with some structural innovations that, ultimately, don't do much. It does, nonetheless, get better as it goes along; Ellis constructs his movie theater finale well, though when its solution smells of such fragrant horseshit (Nick, presently inside a raging inferno... lights a small fire to trigger the sprinkler system), it's hard to give The Final Destination a pass, because that's the film even when it's "working."
Score: 5/10
*1: 16.5 minutes; 2: 13; 3: 19; The: 11; 5: 16.5. (Bloodlines' is too distinctive to usefully compare.) It's interesting that both Ellis's movies are the quickest, though as Death's victims are all strangers in 2, there's nothing to really "settle into," just be wrenched out of, when Kimberly's friends eat it in both of its "timelines."
**It's portrayed by The Long Kiss Goodnight.
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