MartinPh Review of Final Destination

Final Destination (2000)

Mildly entertaining, but silly and inconsistent

[4/10 · 24 October 2005]

The beginning is actually quite good, though not recommended for those with fear of flying. Main character Alex gets a vision of the plane he's in, and that's about to airlift him and his classmates to Paris, exploding. He panics, and together with some of his friends gets kicked off. Of course, the plane then explodes as foreseen. Alex has cheated Death. But as he finds out, this simply means that the survivors are still listed to die, and to be sure, soon enough one after the other gets killed in the gruesome and unlikely ways befitting, I suppose, of this genre. It's up to Alex to figure out Death's rules, and to thwart his plan. That's where things become silly. It is the usual problem in horror movies with supernatural forces: the supernatural world behaves so utterly banal and childish that it stops being scary. Why on earth would Death play a game like this? Logic is obviously thrown overboard entirely. Why would a girl who knows she's next in line to die, go outside in a raging thunderstorm where broken, live power lines are lashing about, to rescue her dog? How do Alex and his chums know so exactly where and how they can get into the morgue at night? Why does Alex repeatedly almost die when sheltering in a wood cabin, and why does the strange wind that presages a death blow through the cabin, even though Alex figures out a minute later that it isn't actually his turn yet? How come the three survivors eventually go on for six months without trouble, even though it turns out they are still scheduled to die? Did Death need a break?? I don't even care to wonder about the psychology of the characters, who are able to deal with one friend's gruesome death after another without shedding a single tear. Worst of all are the obligatory FBI men, who for some strange reason do not arrest a kid who is repeatedly found at the scene of violent deaths, and whose fingerprints are found on a knife sticking in a dead body. They do pick him up when a scared teacher sees him in her front yard, but then - ...just let him go again. Huh? And oh yes, of course: when they finally do decide to arrest him, in the middle of the night in a dark wood, they obviously turn on their sirens and lights, so that he can see and hear them coming a mile away, and has plenty of time to escape. In short: if you are feeling in the mood for something fairly dumb, with an occasional effective scare thrown in, as well as a few cute kids to look at, this will do. If you are looking for intelligent entertainment, look elsewhere.