FINAL DESTINATION 3
Directed by James Wong
Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong
The advantage of doing a series retrospective where you've seen every movie before is supposed to be that you've already formed your opinions, so you can speak magisterially without worrying that you're going to be taken by surprise, yet three films into the Final Destinations that's already happened twice: Final Destination 2 was overthrown as my favorite by the original, despite its prototype flaws, and here comes Final Destination 3, which I've already suggested is where the Final Destinations started going off the rails—ahem—slipping away from virtually any concern besides kill sequences, becoming more exclusively about being containers for those kill sequences than even the description "slasher" already connotes. (It's interesting that folks behind the series disapprove of the word "slasher," and evidently prefer "dead teenager film," Roger Ebert's derisive synonym.) Accordingly, it might be more apt to say the franchise got on its rails after the comparative sincerity of the first, given that the problems that I used to think began in Final Destination 3 shall, as my memory serves (though I guess my memory's questionable!), become inescapable in the second half of the franchise still to come, including its 2025 relaunch.
And the thing is, the only reason I don't think they began in Final Destination 3 anymore is because now I know those problems were already present, albeit in germinal form, in Final Destination 2. But for all that, and we'll get to it, I was surprised to return to 3 and realize I liked it now, and not just enough to budge the needle, but enough to wonder if it's not my second-favorite instead, and, moreover, if there's even something about this franchise that makes any evaluation too contingent to be reliable. Like after the first one, maybe they're not even "real" movies or something. Which is, frankly, also sort of true, and it's at least a plausible hypothesis that the better you remember a Final Destination the less its shock show is going to work the next time around—and vice versa.
I have underrated how good this one's shock show is, though it's not just the kill sequences, it is the container. Final Destination 3 brought back James Wong and Glen Morgan, the filmmakers that I'd practically call the Final Destinations' "creators" (especially given how minimal Jeffrey Reddick's contact with the series has been since the first). Though Wong and Morgan had been too busy (on the delicious junk food of Jet Li's The One and the remake of Willard, respectively) to participate in 2, they now happily returned as co-writers, with Wong directing—the same division of labor as on the original—but they'd clearly learned much from the sequel David Ellis made in the interval, which had smoothed out the kinks in Wong and Morgan's machine, permitting the baroque flower of "the Final Destination death sequence" to reach its full bloom. That bloom remains, and, arguably, the bloom's all it's got: depending on how you approach it, Wong and Morgan's screenplay comes off like a full-on copy-and-paste of Final Destination (moreso than 2 was already), with some slightly-distinctive but fundamentally-the-same bells-and-whistles regarding their protagonist's premonitions, while also restless and belligerent about being formula, not even "they're failing to keep their contempt out of the project," but as if the avowed goal was to cultivate that contempt as a key ingredient of the formula. But it really does depend on how you approach it. In some ways, it might be the most lovingly-crafted screenplay of the lot; I'd describe it as one of the hugest qualitative gulfs between "story treatment" and "script" imaginable, except I'm confounded by the same guys being responsible for both.
So let's turn our gaze once again to the Pacific coast of Middle America (it's "Pennsylvania" this time), with Vancouver's Playland substituting for, I guess, Not Kennywood—it certainly isn't "Playland" in the movie, because its owners realized that this could only be a very bad or very good advertisement for their park, and they weren't willing to countenance the downside risk. Either way, we do have the best-so-far of this franchise's dumb 00s-horror credits montages, deploying a creepy mash-up of old-timey and modern carnival imagery and effectively breaking free from being dumb (besides "are you sure it's the movie that's stupid?" complaints, like "this horror movie takes tarot symbolism overliterally"), except for the imposition of an archaic pinball game which, conceptually, ought to work splendidly, metaphorically simplifying the complex physics of Final Destination kills to a mechanical device even a child would understand—giving us a Death's-eye view of things—while identifying its victims (and hence ourselves) as just metal spheres clanging their sad way towards the ultimate oblivion of a hole, except the pinball game is undernourished CGI and looks like crap. On the plus side, the montage has composer Shirley Walker, and for her last Final Destination I must mention her contribution to these three films, yeoman horror flick work yet without succumbing to anonymity, never "hey, gang, let's jam to this banger of a horror flick score!", but those doom-and-gloom cues are reasonably iconic, and she's been a necessary grounding force.
As for this Final Destination's chief sad metal sphere who, in a flash of insight, comprehends her reality as a sad metal sphere, we have soon-to-graduate high schooler Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, perhaps the last remotely-famous person to feature significantly in a Final Destination, though she wasn't such a thing yet). Wendy's on a night out to the amusement park with her boyfriend Jason (Jesse Moss), his douchey best friend Kevin (Ryan Merriman), and Kevin's girlfriend Carrie (Gina Holden). Also present are a gaggle of schoolmates independently converging on the same fate: plastic pals Ashley and Ashlyn (Chelan Simmons and Crystal Lowe); Frankie Cheeks, the pestering creep out at the amusement park by himself (Sam Easton, and I'm afraid I have to depart from my policy of omitting Final Destination characters' surnames, not because the slightly-tedious horror reference here is so good—I'm not even sure this is one—but because that's how Frankie Cheeks always refers to himself, in the third person); Lewis, the football star sufficiently 'roid-coded to, I guess, also be explicably out at the amusement park by himself (Texas Battle); goth couple Ian and Erin (Kris Lemche and Alexz Johnson); and Wendy's sister Julie (Amanda Crew) and her friend Perry (Maggie Ma). We get an introduction to all these, ah, personalities before they congregate to board The Devil's Flight (at the behest of the voice of the Devil himself, piped in over the loudspeakers to afford Tony Todd his gratifyingly-distinctive cameo), a ride that, thanks to Todd, the production design, and Wong's treatment of it, would be a little unnerving in how over-the-top satanic and just eye-searingly red it is, even in the absence of a prophetic vision of the coaster suffering disaster after disaster that ultimately kills everyone aboard. (So we're already seeing what Wong's gleaned from the previous sequel helmed by a second unit director, though, let's be honest, this is substantially more muddled than 2's all-timer highway pile-up, and is indeed the most muddled part of this movie, with a certain lack of clarity on what even caused the derailment—it's weirdly insistent that one of the kids Wendy manages to remove from the ride caused it—despite the entire point of this insert-heavy sequence being "overwhelming suspense, born from the causal clarity of its detail." Even so, there's plenty to praise about its multi-part disaster and the ritual confirmation of this horror franchise's brawniness; even the requisite CGI and compositing aren't awful, on a 2006 curve.)
So of course Wendy freaks out (if we wished to say, "this Winstead chick might amount to something," we could note her persuasive out-and-out panic), and in the confusion she manages to get most of our named cast off the coaster, but neither her boyfriend nor Kevin's girlfriend (nor, obviously, any of the unnamed cast), who die. Mourning ensues until Wendy gets a bad feeling again, about Ashley and Ashlyn, too late to prevent their joint demise; and by this point Kevin has already leapt into woo, connecting Wendy's prevision to the Internet legendry of the previous Final Destinations, and he's obviously right, for Death is once again tidying things up. The wrinkle, besides the traditional "death order," is that, because of the nature of coincidence in this universe (there is a brazenly tasteless 9/11 reference right here in 2006, though I can't say I truly disapprove—it's probably taken everybody a great deal of restraint to never do the 9/11-themed Final Destination), Wendy managed to capture on her camera nebulous clues as to the circumstances surrounding the remedial deaths. Thus she and Kevin can—perhaps—alter those circumstances. I could question whether this actually makes sense—the idea is that Death was thwarted; then why do photographs present the then-nonexistent future that results from its thwarting?—but the purpose is to be a structuring novelty, so I won't. (And, let's hold off, but there's some tantalizing ambiguity whether Death was thwarted in this one.)
Careful readers will, however, have picked up on Final Destination 3's problem: these guys suck. You may've gotten the mistaken impression that Wendy's okay, and Winstead is, albeit with a figure exposited so bluntly and inhumanely (and so destitute of even basic teen movie familial existence that there's an exchange I initially interpreted as suggesting Wendy and Julie are Party of Five-like orphans), that if you made a drinking game out of the number of times somebody, including Wendy, says "control" or "control freak" regarding her single trait (as the protagonist of a scenario where such a flaw makes no difference), I'm not saying you'd die, but maybe you'd appreciate the "comic" secondary cast more. Now, Final Destination 2 had tested 00s horror's readiness for making a big fraction of a movie out of repellant one-note cartoons, but this is the first Final Destination that truly hates its characters, and while there are narrow tonal ranges where this can work in horror (you'll disagree, but I think Wong and Morgan find one with Black Xmas), it does little but undermine the mordant gallows humor of a Final Destination when it keeps telling you its victims deserve to die.
The best to be said is that it essentially resets Merriman's performance, so that Kevin's a completely new character after the opening—a fairly bland one, afforded a sad irony he never discovers (his grief is rendered "false" by our awareness that his girlfriend despised him and was only running out the clock till graduation) and which the movie isn't sure how to appropriately hang on him, so Winstead's the only one who even tries; but I will accept "quasi-boring meat-puppet with unresolved drama" over the alternatives offered—and it kills its cast quickly enough that by the second half it's mostly the Winstead-and-Merriman show, so by definition it gets better as it goes (see previous "meat-puppet" remark). I don't want to accuse it of total dysfunction, either: the build-up, though faster than the original's, at least reclaims "mystery" as a tool in this franchise's kit after 2 abandoned it, and Wong is insisting on some kind of visual mood again, not necessarily like the original's, and definitely glibber, but still hard-edged and fatalistic. But the script hurts: Wong and Morgan have never been exceptional dialogists, let alone in Final Destination, yet this is so bad (counterpoint: I'd forgotten "Fuck you, Ben Franklin!" and it made me fall off my couch) that it's seemingly bad on-purpose, so the impression I was left with years ago does persist, and I can only suggest the film's other qualities must outweigh a whole bunch of mostly-Vancouverite Z-listers being absolutely horrible. This is especially true for Easton's Frankie fucking Cheeks, whose every utterance is testimony from a rape trial, while Battle's the only one whose characterization is merely miscalibrated, so that at least his unpleasantness gets redeemed in his check-out scene, just for being the primary reason it happens; and perhaps you'll reluctantly concede that the goth jerk gleefully nailgunning a pigeon is "foreshadowing," but in the moment it only feels like one more grotesquerie on the heap.
We could've had better grist for the mill, but at least the mill is working overtime: this potentially has the series' highest average quality of death, even if nothing here quite matches the playful elegance of 2's finest snuffing sequences. The first gets referenced the most, I think, doubtless in part because the deaths of Ashley and Ashlyn in their respective tanning pods are unsettlingly unusual for the series. For one, this has got to be the franchise's most sustained flirtation with slasher sleaze (two topless women dying) and feels uglier than most slasher sleaze because contra how a bunch of puritans would have it, in slashers sex most commonly equals life (death equals death, and it's remarkable, thinking on it, how no Final Destination ever does a mid-or-post-coitus death), and this of course isn't even sexual except as observation colors it, though Wong is certainly doing the coloring (I think the "dude, what?" kicker is that during Wong's B-horror haunted house antics—disagreeably doubling-down after Ellis had exorcised them—the evil indoor breeze accompanying Wendy's cross-cut new premonition rustles a suitcase piled high with her cutest panties*). And so it doesn't function except in a feebler, "nudity equals vulnerability?" way.
A lot of slashers do still hate women, so while Wong and Morgan hate everybody, they really hate Ashley and Ashlyn, and it is phenomenally mean and drawn-out for this series. But damn it, it's well-made (and affecting) in its meanness, and the less-discussed unusualness of it is how although the modal Final Destination death sequence uses numerous misdirects and can be accused, sometimes, of faux complexity, every element this one sets up is an indispensable mechanical link in the causal chain sealing their fates—even the fallen tanning lotion tube that jams a door, and may also symbolize Wong cumming—to the extent I think I perceive a disconnect between the scene's intent and the second unit's execution thereof (unless Wong oversaw it personally), that I'll return to, though one reason I wonder if the second unit supervised is because Simmons and Lowe find noticeably more-likeable performances as soon as it begins. (As for definitely-Wong, the subsequent match cut to their coffins, though dubious—these unrelated women evidently share a cemetery plot—is striking enough to justify it.**) Erin's demise, though it certainly involves a misdirect, is playing fair with that misdirect, and has just as many moving parts (it involves the gorgeously-slow recruitment of half a hardware store against her) to finally arrive at some unrecommended facial piercings for the alt-girl.
The filmmakers are mixing things up: Lewis's gym-related death is the most successful bleak comedy (besides maybe the denouement, which actually calls back to it), and involves much more can-we-parse-it-in-time stimulus for Wendy (and us) to squirm through as Battle gets ever-louder in his denial of Death, getting away with it long enough for it to be a delectably gory joke when he doesn't (and Chris Willingham's editing is yoked exquisitely to the escalating cacophony of the sound design). Frankie Cheeks's passing, meanwhile, is all misdirect—with perfect unfairness, as he's not even "in" this scene that's primarily "about" Wendy and Kevin, and secondarily "about" the drive-thru customer's greatest fear, manifested into vehicles rendered almost as geometric abstractions. I also don't want to omit the denouement, wherein Wendy has another premonition that, given the subway setting, could not possibly save her, after which she survives anyway only to die in the follow-through, because Final Destination 3 is nothing besides giddily fucking with us, cruel because the universe can have no other aspect in the end. If we hadn't noticed that already, we would have by the actual climax, which is absurdist chaos on the theme of this town's tricentennial, with a big convolution thrown into the mix as Ian, accused of trying to hack Death's design, suddenly realizes thanks to Wendy's paranoia that killing Wendy himself might do the trick.
The very careful reader will ask, "how is Wendy physically present at almost literally all of these deaths?" In fact, she's non-physically present at Ashley and Ashlyn's, making a phone call that sure feels like Willingham is doing his damnedest to insinuate the ring shook the coat tree to make it fall to begin the Rube Goldberged madness, because nobody noticed during shooting that Simmons put the bag in the wrong place for her character's phone to do so. Because, otherwise, Wendy herself is setting the conditions for Death's design throughout the film, quietly and in a way the movie doesn't even whisper aloud but becomes a meditation on the difference between "but-for cause" and "proximate cause," and I don't think it's possibly accidental. There's something ecstatically perverse once you notice that this cursed girl is putting everyone in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for Deathly coincidence to claim them (and this Final Destination understands its franchise's ideas about "coincidence" so well), enough to wonder if even her premonition was part of Death's design this time. The film is full of choice thrills-and-spills, and that is, still, the big thing; but Final Destinations are rarely as heady as they ought to be, and, despite its grating flaws, Final Destination 3 gets there.
Score: 8/10
*The actual kicker might be dialogue that subsequently establishes the nude dead girls' characters have not reached their majority. Like, maybe the line should be asking why they don't get "to see college," not "eighteen." Is the thinnest veneer of propriety too much?
**I also really love the single split diopter shot Wong seems to have been contractually allowed by New Line in exchange for agreeing to the franchise's shift to a Panavision ratio, and wish there were many more.
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