Final Destination
My, my, my, have we got a winner this time around. Kids, listen to me now and hear me later: see this film if you're in the mood for some roll-your-own comedy. The rest of the theatre and myself couldn't stop laughing all the way through the film, and that was usually at the *ahem* scary bits.
As an aside, I ordered a large Kool-Ade before going into the film. Whatever passes for cherry in kiddy drinks these days is head and shoulders scarier than what that feelm served up.
Let's get the ratings out of the way first, shall we?
Gore: 7
Schmaltz: 9
Character Development: 1
Sturgeon Principle: Falls in the lower 40th percentile.
I don't think I can really do this film justice in recap. Why? Because in the end it's so bare-bones that a recap would be like pulling off Ted Danson's wig in the middle of a Cheers episode (yes, Irony, Irony, shuttup I'm making a point here); it would reveal once and for all that under the trappings, there just all that much pretty to look at. The fast, fast recap is that seven fugitives from
Dawson's Creek Island and their largely irrelevant friends are preparing to board a seven hour flight to France, for a little whorin', winin' and carousin'. And that's just what the teachers are planning to do. Our lead character (who has a name, but we'll call him Dawson because he suffers from Dawson's Creek Syndrome, that is, he looks like a high-school kid, but he speaks as though he just matriculated four years of Philosophy at Yale) forces us to sit through Crazy High-School Kid antics twice: once as he has a vision of his plane exploding (YES!!!!) and once as he relives a few moments of that event before realising that he is
out of there. A total of seven people are let off the plane, which apparently horks Death off to no end, because he spends the rest of the movie killing off the lucky septet in the order that they would have died on the plane.
This is more or less where the film breaks down, for several reasons. The first and biggest reason is that this film, like so many other horror films before it, has the slayer -
The big D himself... all the way from the Stygian shores of Styx... let's give it up for DEATH!
- follow a series of rules which govern how the kiddies are going to die. The main character, our Dawson clone, begins the film not knowing what those rules are but at one point that becomes inconvenient to the plot, so he magically runs Death-On-Line and gets himself patched up to Knows Everything Level 6. Also, the film bends more than three Indian Rubber Men playing Twister in trying to keep exploding heads and strangling necks while following its rather clumsy set of rules. The ending suffers greatly for this, as the film-makers decided to tack on the usual 'make room for the sequel, we're not done yet!' surprise which of course, we were all expecting from the moment we bit into our first kernel of popcorn.
The second reason that this film falls down is that all of the characters make you want to pin them down with iron rivets to the shoulders, grab a drill and trefinate the hell out of their skulls while making their parents watch. This is generally non-conducive to caring that a whole lotta kids are getting spattered all over the stage.
The third reason is the nature of our slayer. Y'see... he's Death. Not only is he Death, but well, see, we have no idea who he is or what he's all about, unless the movie was trying to tell us that he was really a powerfully built black man who skulks around coroners' offices and cracks stupid jokes about himself. Aside from that one appearance, all we ever see of Death is, well, deaths. There's no feeling that he has limits (beyond being utterly entranced with over-complicated plans that even Fred from Scooby-Doo would reject), that there's any way to defeat him permanently, that he could be faced on a human level... hell, even Freddy from
A Nightmare on Elm Street was, for all of his powers and skills, a brilliant villain because he was in some very important ways flawed and human.
And finally, we have the deaths themselves. We learn from these deaths that a) Death thinks no death is complete without sparks flying
everywhere and b) that apparently Death has never heard of 'heartstop' or 'brain tumors' or any other kind of passing along that doesn't involve fishing line and a big train. Here's a list of some of the people who assist death in his grim deeds.
- The Tidy Bowl Man. Yes, our friend is now a scion of death, as he reaches out his fresh, sanitized water as the icy hand of DEATH!
- Mass-Transit. Busses. Trains. Cars. AVOID! For they are in league with DEATH!
- The Steel Industry. Remember! Anything metallic could suddenly become sharp and pointy and KILL you where you stand!
- Russia and Dell. Oh woe, the Cold war has shifted to the Chill of the Grave. For when east meets west, Vodka, beloved drink of the Iron Curtain, collaborates with a Thantophilic monitor to put an end to another of our beloved characters!
- France. They love Jerry Lewis there. How many more clues do you need that they all bow down to the Grim Reaper himself?
Of course, gentle reader, let it not be said that this movie is afraid to take certain risks. We are presented with many scenes which will simply steal your breath (but will it give it... back?)
- The Top-Down Bathroom Scene. Yes, no other film has DARED to give you what you really want: crane shots of two ugly guys on the can! TWO, do you hear me? Not one, but TWO!
- Another bathroom scene in which yet another ugly guy makes water, serving as the harbinger for the Evil of the Tidy-Bowl man!
- Lightning striking the ground to fore-shadow that this is really a scary movie, gosh! When... there was a tree two meters to the left of the ground. The... ground. That big thing that
grounds you? You know? That thing? I dunno about you, but I'd have found lightning striking a tree a little bit scarier than death apparently putting a CD in the microwave.
- When our Dawson looks at the board in the airport, he focuses on the word 'terminal'! Because... see.. it's an airport terminal! And he's going to die! And that's terminal! And... ah... heh... it's... fore-shadowing! Yeah! With a sledge-hammer!
- When our Dawson looks out of his window, he sees a landing-gear strut. And suddenly scary music plays! So it's not just a landing-gear strut... it's the landing gear strut of DEATH!
- The Toilet... of DEATH!
- The tea-kettle... of DEATH!
- The small, ugly, baby... of DEATH!
- The great big metal door... of DEATH!
The sad thing is, that I could go on for hours with the Death jokes. It's really that bad. If someone coughs, it's apparently fore-shadowing. If there had been a love scene in this film, it would have been the love scene... of DEATH!
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