Eli’s Plot Twist – The Final Destination 3D review

The Final Destination franchise makes one last pit stop on its way to straight-to-DVD hell.  Director David R. Ellis is back at the helm after the series peaking Final Destination 2, but fails to deliver anything beyond familiar laughs.  The movie is purportedly shot using the same ‘revolutionary’ technology as James Cameron uses in Avatar.  If this 3D gimmick is what Cameron spent ten years of his creative life inventing, it was a sorry waste of time, not to mention the fact that filming schlock like this does not add any gravitas to the medium, but makes it seem low rent.  Instead of a new twist in the mythos of death, the fourth entry in the series uses 3D to differentiate the product.  It is not a terrible movie by any means, but you get a sense that this formula, which used to be cool, is obliviously running the same old routine.

I think it is very interesting to look backward at a series of films and see the course that it takes.  Like so many things that seemed really great at the time, close inspection reveals the cheap cloth of the article.  Final Destination was the analog to the glut of teen sex comedies from ten years ago, replacing gaping holes in heads for gaping holes in baked goods.  I have to admit that the studios seemed to have tapped into the burgeoning materialism of youth culture which seemed to peak around the time of the first movie’s release.  Final Destination took itself so seriously, and actually tried to be somber and foreboding, and how readily we bought into the bullshit.  You would scarcely believe the franchise ever took itself seriously, as it is now a bloody slapstick comedy.  Final Destination 2 was a better bag of action, and the third entry was balls to the wall kinetic energy.  The Final Destination 3D tries to emulate the third film most prominently, maybe because it’s the freshest in our mind, but it just doesn’t have the steam.

X-ray views of the first film’s kills give us a refresher in the series, and then we’re off to the races.  Death never seems to want to kill the youngsters with, oh, say, an embolism or leukemia.  Filmed in Alabama and New Orleans, the movie has a strange, if original, subtext of southern racism and rednecks.  Poor Mykelti Williamson plays George, the doomed racetrack security guard.  You may remember him as Private Bubba from Forest Gump, his movie standards seemed to have slipped.  A bunch of other replacement young attractive people and yokels fit the bill, headed up by premonition proffering Bobby Campo playing Nick, a cross between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and James Franco.  He is pretty good at playing the somber cool kid, and some of the dead pan deliveries make you think he is the long lost illegitimate son of Paul Walker.  His fortunate fortune telling spares them from a NASCAR massacre.

The NASCAR crash is disappointing, because the action is mostly in the stands, with limited vehicular slaughter.  While it is entertaining to see people smashed by flying engine blocks and crushed under flaming race cars, I was hoping for a lot more cars flying into the camera 3D like.  The 3D is a mixed bag, with surfaces shimmering and out of focus, and gore expressed as necessarily goofy CGI composites.  Coraline was a 3D movie that was smooth as ice, Up had one or two instances of shimmering surfaces, but once you’re out of animation and into actual filming, things break down fast.  The effects are just downright goofy, and one of the strong points of the series has always been reasonably believable gore, stuffing mannequins full of sheep guts and the like.  Director Ellis claimed he wanted to ‘add depth’ and not ‘stick stuff in the screen every 4 minutes.’  He must have dropped this conceit, because all of the 3D is pretty gimmicky, complete with shitty computerized snake hissing at the audience.  

To be fair, the finale is actually bigger and better than the first act.  In a bit of undeveloped metafictional tinkering, a theatre playing a 3D movie (an appropriately dubbed double imaged Long Kiss Goodnight) causes massive death.  Is the director suggesting that the 3D experience he is offering is pretty close to actually being shot in the face with nails?  That is misplaced confidence.  The movie is much better when it is sucking the asshole out of the jock douche bag and shooting it out of a phallic pump, which may or may not have been foreshadowed by his premature ejaculation in a poolside tryst.  Again, is the director trying to draw a comparison between an orgasm and having your rectum pulled out?  Additionally, the racial element of the film is unavoidably amusing.  When a redneck tries to burn a cross in the black character’s lawn, he is dragged behind a truck while on fire, an apparent reference to the James Byrd Jr. incident in Jasper, Texas.  Is this death giving ironic comeuppance to racists of the south?  Later, after an unsuccessful suicide, George hangs out with the surviving teens wearing an iconic noose nonchalantly, in a mood that is meant to convey awkward comedy. 

Whatever its flaws, this film still tries be the cool kid on the block.  There are a few memorable deaths, but like a guy who is trying too hard to get a girl’s attention, something just seems a little bit weak in the delivery.  The shifty 3D doesn’t really help as much as it distracts, and the gore could definitely use some more work.  Ellis made a damn fine Final Destination film back in 2003, but now he is just saying, “Remember that time?”  It is always sad to see a horror franchise circle the drain, which they must always do, it is the cycle of life.  Don’t despair though, you will likely see more sequels, right along with American Pie 7 – Stifler’s Nephew’s Crazy Dorm Adventure, and once that plays out, I’m sure the studios will be ready for a remake.