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Random Movie: THE Final Destination (2009)


I will admit that I did not have entirely good expectations going into this one. Our own #pbf referred to this as garbage, and he has not seen THE third film in this series. I had seen a few positive reviews for THE Final Destination though so I figured maybe it was an acquired taste, much like Mountain Dew: Live Wire. Oh, dear God was I wrong. So, so wrong … I knew in THE first ten minutes of this film that it would be given THE “honorable” crap category. THE other seventy minutes were merely confirmation that I can judge a stupid movie by its even stupider fucking cover.



At this point in THE series, Final Destination has merely transformed into a Mad Libs for “horror” films. ________ (Proper Noun) has a vision of ________ (horrible event) before it happens. He/She manages to extract ________ (number) people from THE disaster before it happens. ________ (Proper Noun that rhymes with Seth) comes after them all in ridiculously over-THE-top ways. Roll credits. It is bad enough when there is no shock or surprise in a movie. It is another when that movie seems to exist solely to show you how much THE human race sucks.

I must formally apologize to James Wong and Glen Morgan for criticizing Final Destination 3. After all, they created characters as deep as the ocean floor compared to this movie. I honestly cannot remember any of the character’s names, not because I didn’t hear them enough, but I just did not give a damn. I liked that the first film took a while to get the to big disaster. The second and third films were not as in depth but it was still grounding to see our characters in normal life before (Proper Noun that rhymes with Seth) comes knocking at their door. This movie though has the big foreseen disaster before the opening credits! What the ________ (Word that rhymes with duck)!

Considering that this was the shortest film in the series thus far, with probably as many kills mind you, regular movie goers likely thought they were in for a treat when Death’s vengeance came roaring back again and again with little time between. Since I’ve suffered through all of these movies in three days (for you, dammit!), I felt like I was watching a Faces of Death video with mindless, stupidly staged kills back-to-back-to-back. It’s bad enough that a few of the deaths were recycled from the earlier movies but the fact that everything was so rapid leaves no time or reason to contemplate on what has just happened. Literally, one character is mowed-over by a vehicle and the other character in the scene simply turns around and moves on. Compare that to Terri in the original when she was hit by a bus out of nowhere that I was floored by. No time for such nonsense here.

I would assume that this moderately budgeted movie had to trim some fat to make up for the spectacular 3D graphics. Of course, I watched this on DVD on my regular folk TV so the 3D was nonexistent. The main character’s visions of the upcoming deaths though were rendered in fantastic graphics that I have not seen since the age of PSOne. Literally, a snake or nail or whatever coming at your face looks just as real as Final Fantasy 7. Since the effects were so pricey, gone are any decent, or even marginal, actors. Instead, we get a bunch of nice-looking 20-somethings who couldn’t act their way out of an iCarly lunchbox. But, their role is merely to die in horrible, yet laudable, ways so perhaps that is what the filmmakers were going for.

Yet, I cannot believe that David R. Ellis, director of the comparably Shakespearean part 2, would sign on to such crap. Every man needs a meal ticket and I guess this was his. I am fully willing to accept a horror movie with shit actors, shit characters, and shit effects. But I was not quite expecting that from this admittedly mediocre series as it plays like the straight-to-video version of a Final Destination sequel, complete with one (1!) reputable actor in Mykelti Williamson. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this film.

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