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yendiFinal Destination 3. 2006. Directed by James Wong. Written by Wong and Glen Morgan. Released by New Line.
I've already written about the second movie in this series. By the time Final Destination 3 came out, the series had already acheived true formula level. To wit:
A group of friends are out having a good time when, all of a sudden, things go horribly wrong. But wait! It turns out that the entire clusterfuck was just in the head of one of the characters, who gets his or her friends to safety. And everyone is happy, except for Death. Death, instead of being the hardworking, honest, and likable anthropomorphication that we're used to from the works of Pratchett and Gaiman, is an evil, invisible force of nature that is saddled with an obsessive need to finish what it started. Death also feels a need to make things as complicated as possible, and has never even heard of aneurysms or heart attacks. Eventually, one or two folks somehow manage to survive, because Death presumably gives up after a while. Or something. But there's always a nice twist ending just to keep us on our toes.
With that in mind, I can say that Final Destination 3 is utterly faithful to the formula.
We start at an amusement park, where a group of friends are enjoying themselves before graduation. One of them takes lots of pictures for the yearbook. As she takes pictures of all her friends, we're supposed to be meeting the characters and knowing the future victims, but other than photographer Wendy, they're all pretty interchangeable and boring. We do get lots of creepy foreshadowing, and eventually, the group of kids makes it to the coaster.
You know what happens next.
Fluids start leaking, gears start shifting, and one moron drops his videocam on the track. This leads to a ten-minute sequence of chaos and death. It's well-choreographed (featuring a nice "body sliced in half" moment, among other things), if not nearly as impressive as the car crash that opened the second movie. Of course, it's just a dream, and Wendy, on coming out of the vision, goes into hysterics. This leads to a minor fistfight, and a group of the kids get thrown off. However, Wendy's boyfriend and her best friend remain on the coaster, and sure enough, they die.
Cut to just before graduation. Wendy mopes. Her late best friend's (now ex-) boyfriend Kevin serves as Master of Exposition, telling the story of Flight 180 from the original movie, and how the folks who got off the plane died in the same order they would have died on the plane (how he knows this last fact escapes me). He doesn't explicitly say, "Hey, since my girlfriend and your boyfriend both died in the same accident, we should hook up," but you know he's thinking it.
Wendy mopes a bit more (this time at her bratty sister), and finally looks at the photos she took at the amusement park. And OMG, they're all creepy-like. In very vague ways, like a blurry shot that could maybe be interpreted as a fire, not real creepy shots like the ones from The Ring. This freaks her out anyway, and she decides to try to pass this "information" on to her fellow coaster survivors.
Speaking of which, the two dumbest of these are at the tanning salon. Through a series of contrivances, the proprietor gets locked out. And then the really bad things start to happen. The girls A) bring in a Slushee in spite of the rules against bringing drinks into the room, B) set the temperature in the room up a few degrees, and C) manage to break a shelf while getting some CDs ready. They also commit the ultimate movie sin and go topless! That's certain doom.
As the girls tan (listening to "Love Rollercoaster," on the stereo, incidentally) the heat of the room creates condensation on the Slushee, causing water to drop into the circuitry, leading the machines to overload and start working on HyperTan*. Just as the girls start to realize this, Wendy calls them, and the phone's vibration causes a chain reaction leading to the coat rack tipping over, knocking over a shelf, and trapping both girls in their tanning beds. From there, they get HyperTanned to death.
After the funeral, Wendy and Kevin compare notes. She's now a full conspiracy theorist, and somehow convinces Kevin that Death is after them, and that the photos hold the clue. As they try to figure out what will happen to Frank, the sleazy guy who graduated two years ago but was hanging around the amusement park to hit on girls, the next Series of Unfortunate Events begins:
1. Kevin and Wendy nearly swipe a truck, causing the driver to forget to put on his emergency brake.
2. At a drive-through, Kevin and Wendy get trapped when a truck backs into their passenger door.
3. Meanwhile, that initial truck is rolling down the road, and although the kids get out, the truck slams their car, sending the still-spinning motor into the head of the driver in front of them. Who turns out to be Frank. What a coincidence!
They later find a second photo in which Frank, in the background, has his head near a rotating fan. So they're now convinced.
The next guy scheduled to die is the jock, who's up in football training camp**. As they confront him, he declares that he'll defy death, and he does it pretty well (even as he works out), until a series of events leads to two giant (and real) swords slicing down, cutting a bunch of equipment. The jock thinks he just survived, when, out of nowhere, the two overhead weights come crashing down on his head.
Next in line are the two Goth kids, working the graveyard restocking shift at the Home Depot. I won't even begin to describe what happens, but it involves sawdust, a magnetized pole, nails, a dead pigeon, two forklifts, a random inflatable bag, and a bunch of falling boards. If this murder were a sex act, it would be the most illegal thing ever. Long story short, they save Boy Goth, but Girl Goth falls over backwards, and a nailgun goes off into the back of her skull (gruesomely nailing the front of her face to her hands).
Wendy goes home and naps, and Julie, her sister, heads out just as Wendy wakes up. When Wendy looks at her computer, she recognizes a hand in one of the pictures as belonging to her sister, so now she knows that her sister might well be next. Fortunately, her sister is at the same place as Kevin: the town's Tricentennial.
The important "coincidences" at the event (essentially a large county fair) are a spear getting left by a cannon, and a cannonball that rolls across a field, knocking one of the fireworks carts slightly off kilter. Oh, and two little shits deciding to spook an already-nervous horse*** by lighting a cherry bomb behind it. The horse barrels across the field, and a rope attached to it manages to loop around Julie's neck, dragging the girl across the field****. Just as the horse is about to drag her into an old thresher, Kevin uses a prop sword to cut the rope, saving her life. However, Julie's best friend was on the coaster with her, and soon enough, that spear I mentioned before ends up exploding into her chest.
In the chaos the ensues, Kevin almost dies when a shish kabob skewer causes a minor gas explosion, but Wendy pulls him out of the way in time. Since both Julie and Kevin were saved from Death's revenge, it's Wendy's turn, and Wendy is convinced that Goth Boy will be the death of her based on the photo.
Of course, this is ten degrees of stupid, since Death had planned to kill Goth Boy back when these photos were taken, so his plan for Wendy's death couldn't possibly have involved him. But trying to apply logic to the Final Destination movies is about the biggest waste of time one can imagine*****. Let's not go down that dark and dreary path.
Anyway, Goth Boy, angsty over the loss of Goth Girl, happens to have followed Wendy to the fair, and confronts the three of them. He somehow intuits that she thinks he'll be responsible for her death, and instead of pointing out how stupid and illogical this is, simply rants aimlessly about how he can't wait to see her die, etc. Sure enough, that fireworks cart that got knocked askew three paragraphs ago topples completely, and shoots fireworks straight at Wendy, who is only saved when Julie and Kevin knock her down. Goth Boy is also unharmed, but Death comes back for him, sending a crane crashing down on his head. And with that, we end.
Well, not really. But we cut to five months later. Wendy is at college in an unnamed town in which all subway stops appear to be named after presidential assassins. She gets a bad feeling, and she's about to leave the train when Julie shows up, having gotten to the city early. Wendy explains her bad feeling, but Julie says that the three of them went over it, and beating death means they're off the hook. Which makes no sense, of course, since we know that Goth Boy died, and anyone who saw the second movie also knows that Ali Larter didn't get to cheat death, either. But as I said, logic isn't the strong suit of these films.
Anyway, by an amazing coincidence, Kevin's on the same train. And sure enough, thanks to a candy bar, a rat, and some electricity******, the train crashes, killing everyone on board (with nice gruesome deaths for Julie and Kevin) but Wendy, who is thrown onto the tracks with a broken leg. As she looks up, another train barrels around the corner, she screams, and then she comes out of her vision.
Only, and here's the amazing twist, it's only a few seconds before the accident, and there's simply no way to stop or get off the train. Fade to black.
Look, I'm as big a fan of Morgan and Wong's X-Files days as anybody. But Morgan's screenplays since then are logical nightmares, and Wong would never use two or three subtle visual clues when he could slam you over the head with about sixty of them instead*******. Neither of which would be a cardinal sin if either of them could develop characters. Alas, the victims here are never pitched as anything more than generic folks waiting to die, a step back from the second movie in the series, when the cast of older and more interesting characters actually made for an entertaining film beyond the deaths themselves. As for the logic holes, the less said, the better. I was almost expecting the cliched "twist" from Soul Survivors to pop up, as the idea that the entire movie is a dream is really the only thing that would make sense.
That said, this movie is really all about the deaths, and if that's what you're here for, you won't be disappointed. The special effects are damned good, featuring some nice levels of gore, lots of severed limbs, and good explosions. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as Wendy, does a great job holding the film together, and most of the cast does a good enough job playing off of her. If you can check your brain at the door and lower your expectations enough, Final Destination 3 can be a fun popcorn movie.
*George Hamilton, incidentally, would probably be immune to a machine set on HyperTan.
**Yes, in late May. It's Remedial Football.
***I mean, who keeps a horse this close to fireworks, anyway? Also, I'm sad to say that the two little shits do not get their teeth kicked in.
****The dragging sequence goes on for at least two minutes, but she doesn't end up with any grass stains. Hooray for Scotchgard!
*****Short of trying to remake Halloween. I'm not done with you yet, Rob Zombie!
******Maybe Death isn't really Rube Goldberg. Maybe he's MacGuyver.
*******And, let's face it: Their classic X-Files days were about creating a sense of mystery, not actually resolving everything into a clean and coherent story.
I've already written about the second movie in this series. By the time Final Destination 3 came out, the series had already acheived true formula level. To wit:
A group of friends are out having a good time when, all of a sudden, things go horribly wrong. But wait! It turns out that the entire clusterfuck was just in the head of one of the characters, who gets his or her friends to safety. And everyone is happy, except for Death. Death, instead of being the hardworking, honest, and likable anthropomorphication that we're used to from the works of Pratchett and Gaiman, is an evil, invisible force of nature that is saddled with an obsessive need to finish what it started. Death also feels a need to make things as complicated as possible, and has never even heard of aneurysms or heart attacks. Eventually, one or two folks somehow manage to survive, because Death presumably gives up after a while. Or something. But there's always a nice twist ending just to keep us on our toes.
With that in mind, I can say that Final Destination 3 is utterly faithful to the formula.
We start at an amusement park, where a group of friends are enjoying themselves before graduation. One of them takes lots of pictures for the yearbook. As she takes pictures of all her friends, we're supposed to be meeting the characters and knowing the future victims, but other than photographer Wendy, they're all pretty interchangeable and boring. We do get lots of creepy foreshadowing, and eventually, the group of kids makes it to the coaster.
You know what happens next.
Fluids start leaking, gears start shifting, and one moron drops his videocam on the track. This leads to a ten-minute sequence of chaos and death. It's well-choreographed (featuring a nice "body sliced in half" moment, among other things), if not nearly as impressive as the car crash that opened the second movie. Of course, it's just a dream, and Wendy, on coming out of the vision, goes into hysterics. This leads to a minor fistfight, and a group of the kids get thrown off. However, Wendy's boyfriend and her best friend remain on the coaster, and sure enough, they die.
Cut to just before graduation. Wendy mopes. Her late best friend's (now ex-) boyfriend Kevin serves as Master of Exposition, telling the story of Flight 180 from the original movie, and how the folks who got off the plane died in the same order they would have died on the plane (how he knows this last fact escapes me). He doesn't explicitly say, "Hey, since my girlfriend and your boyfriend both died in the same accident, we should hook up," but you know he's thinking it.
Wendy mopes a bit more (this time at her bratty sister), and finally looks at the photos she took at the amusement park. And OMG, they're all creepy-like. In very vague ways, like a blurry shot that could maybe be interpreted as a fire, not real creepy shots like the ones from The Ring. This freaks her out anyway, and she decides to try to pass this "information" on to her fellow coaster survivors.
Speaking of which, the two dumbest of these are at the tanning salon. Through a series of contrivances, the proprietor gets locked out. And then the really bad things start to happen. The girls A) bring in a Slushee in spite of the rules against bringing drinks into the room, B) set the temperature in the room up a few degrees, and C) manage to break a shelf while getting some CDs ready. They also commit the ultimate movie sin and go topless! That's certain doom.
As the girls tan (listening to "Love Rollercoaster," on the stereo, incidentally) the heat of the room creates condensation on the Slushee, causing water to drop into the circuitry, leading the machines to overload and start working on HyperTan*. Just as the girls start to realize this, Wendy calls them, and the phone's vibration causes a chain reaction leading to the coat rack tipping over, knocking over a shelf, and trapping both girls in their tanning beds. From there, they get HyperTanned to death.
After the funeral, Wendy and Kevin compare notes. She's now a full conspiracy theorist, and somehow convinces Kevin that Death is after them, and that the photos hold the clue. As they try to figure out what will happen to Frank, the sleazy guy who graduated two years ago but was hanging around the amusement park to hit on girls, the next Series of Unfortunate Events begins:
1. Kevin and Wendy nearly swipe a truck, causing the driver to forget to put on his emergency brake.
2. At a drive-through, Kevin and Wendy get trapped when a truck backs into their passenger door.
3. Meanwhile, that initial truck is rolling down the road, and although the kids get out, the truck slams their car, sending the still-spinning motor into the head of the driver in front of them. Who turns out to be Frank. What a coincidence!
They later find a second photo in which Frank, in the background, has his head near a rotating fan. So they're now convinced.
The next guy scheduled to die is the jock, who's up in football training camp**. As they confront him, he declares that he'll defy death, and he does it pretty well (even as he works out), until a series of events leads to two giant (and real) swords slicing down, cutting a bunch of equipment. The jock thinks he just survived, when, out of nowhere, the two overhead weights come crashing down on his head.
Next in line are the two Goth kids, working the graveyard restocking shift at the Home Depot. I won't even begin to describe what happens, but it involves sawdust, a magnetized pole, nails, a dead pigeon, two forklifts, a random inflatable bag, and a bunch of falling boards. If this murder were a sex act, it would be the most illegal thing ever. Long story short, they save Boy Goth, but Girl Goth falls over backwards, and a nailgun goes off into the back of her skull (gruesomely nailing the front of her face to her hands).
Wendy goes home and naps, and Julie, her sister, heads out just as Wendy wakes up. When Wendy looks at her computer, she recognizes a hand in one of the pictures as belonging to her sister, so now she knows that her sister might well be next. Fortunately, her sister is at the same place as Kevin: the town's Tricentennial.
The important "coincidences" at the event (essentially a large county fair) are a spear getting left by a cannon, and a cannonball that rolls across a field, knocking one of the fireworks carts slightly off kilter. Oh, and two little shits deciding to spook an already-nervous horse*** by lighting a cherry bomb behind it. The horse barrels across the field, and a rope attached to it manages to loop around Julie's neck, dragging the girl across the field****. Just as the horse is about to drag her into an old thresher, Kevin uses a prop sword to cut the rope, saving her life. However, Julie's best friend was on the coaster with her, and soon enough, that spear I mentioned before ends up exploding into her chest.
In the chaos the ensues, Kevin almost dies when a shish kabob skewer causes a minor gas explosion, but Wendy pulls him out of the way in time. Since both Julie and Kevin were saved from Death's revenge, it's Wendy's turn, and Wendy is convinced that Goth Boy will be the death of her based on the photo.
Of course, this is ten degrees of stupid, since Death had planned to kill Goth Boy back when these photos were taken, so his plan for Wendy's death couldn't possibly have involved him. But trying to apply logic to the Final Destination movies is about the biggest waste of time one can imagine*****. Let's not go down that dark and dreary path.
Anyway, Goth Boy, angsty over the loss of Goth Girl, happens to have followed Wendy to the fair, and confronts the three of them. He somehow intuits that she thinks he'll be responsible for her death, and instead of pointing out how stupid and illogical this is, simply rants aimlessly about how he can't wait to see her die, etc. Sure enough, that fireworks cart that got knocked askew three paragraphs ago topples completely, and shoots fireworks straight at Wendy, who is only saved when Julie and Kevin knock her down. Goth Boy is also unharmed, but Death comes back for him, sending a crane crashing down on his head. And with that, we end.
Well, not really. But we cut to five months later. Wendy is at college in an unnamed town in which all subway stops appear to be named after presidential assassins. She gets a bad feeling, and she's about to leave the train when Julie shows up, having gotten to the city early. Wendy explains her bad feeling, but Julie says that the three of them went over it, and beating death means they're off the hook. Which makes no sense, of course, since we know that Goth Boy died, and anyone who saw the second movie also knows that Ali Larter didn't get to cheat death, either. But as I said, logic isn't the strong suit of these films.
Anyway, by an amazing coincidence, Kevin's on the same train. And sure enough, thanks to a candy bar, a rat, and some electricity******, the train crashes, killing everyone on board (with nice gruesome deaths for Julie and Kevin) but Wendy, who is thrown onto the tracks with a broken leg. As she looks up, another train barrels around the corner, she screams, and then she comes out of her vision.
Only, and here's the amazing twist, it's only a few seconds before the accident, and there's simply no way to stop or get off the train. Fade to black.
Look, I'm as big a fan of Morgan and Wong's X-Files days as anybody. But Morgan's screenplays since then are logical nightmares, and Wong would never use two or three subtle visual clues when he could slam you over the head with about sixty of them instead*******. Neither of which would be a cardinal sin if either of them could develop characters. Alas, the victims here are never pitched as anything more than generic folks waiting to die, a step back from the second movie in the series, when the cast of older and more interesting characters actually made for an entertaining film beyond the deaths themselves. As for the logic holes, the less said, the better. I was almost expecting the cliched "twist" from Soul Survivors to pop up, as the idea that the entire movie is a dream is really the only thing that would make sense.
That said, this movie is really all about the deaths, and if that's what you're here for, you won't be disappointed. The special effects are damned good, featuring some nice levels of gore, lots of severed limbs, and good explosions. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, as Wendy, does a great job holding the film together, and most of the cast does a good enough job playing off of her. If you can check your brain at the door and lower your expectations enough, Final Destination 3 can be a fun popcorn movie.
*George Hamilton, incidentally, would probably be immune to a machine set on HyperTan.
**Yes, in late May. It's Remedial Football.
***I mean, who keeps a horse this close to fireworks, anyway? Also, I'm sad to say that the two little shits do not get their teeth kicked in.
****The dragging sequence goes on for at least two minutes, but she doesn't end up with any grass stains. Hooray for Scotchgard!
*****Short of trying to remake Halloween. I'm not done with you yet, Rob Zombie!
******Maybe Death isn't really Rube Goldberg. Maybe he's MacGuyver.
*******And, let's face it: Their classic X-Files days were about creating a sense of mystery, not actually resolving everything into a clean and coherent story.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Psst...
Date: 2007-04-09 12:43 pm (UTC)You typed "George Harrison."
(Wow; only 40 minutes after I woke up and I'm giving proofing advice...)
Re: Psst...
Date: 2007-04-09 12:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 01:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 01:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 04:18 pm (UTC)All things considered, yes, if you turn your brain off, this is a fun little timewaster.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 06:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 10:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 04:39 pm (UTC)Also, Tony Todd was the subway conductor. Can't believe you missed his voice.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 07:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 10:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-09 10:12 pm (UTC)