Post by GL on Feb 12, 2007 12:33:19 GMT -5
“Final Destination 3” is a pretty decent entry, but it’s not the best one in the series.
**SPOILERS**
Enjoying their Graduation Day, Wendy Christensen, (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her classmates are partying inside a packed carnival, and after being talked into the main attraction, a 200 foot-tall roller coaster with friends Kevin Fischer, (Ryan Merriman) Jason Robert Wise, (Jesse Moss) and Carrie Dreyer, (Gina Holden) she has an odd premonition involving the ride crashing, and manages to get several of her friends off as well. After the ride crashes as she predicted, the ones who got off start to die in strange, inexplicable accidents. Hearing a rumor that this happened before, they discover that Death has started stalking them and plans to take them out for thwarting his plan. Banning together with the still-alive survivors, they try to save each other from Death while staying alive themselves.
The Good News: This here was a fairly nice surprise. It opens quite promisingly with an extended runaway roller coaster sequence that is extremely creative in design, execution and intention. re back in the saddle (after getting spanked with their flop remake, "Willard"); promising that they're ready to dish out the lurid, intricately arranged genre pleasures that the series has become known for. It’s a bravura and dazzling set-piece, playing into primal theme park fears every amusement park goer might have, as a roller coaster goes dramatically wrong. The hydraulics are on the fritz, the tracks are broken, the restraints come unlocked and people fly out of their seats, and the car gets stuck upside down in the middle of a loop. This is the film’s most genuine terror and tension sequence, as the events are depicted so quickly that it is mind-blowing to see it pulled off in such a manner. The event may have been scaled back a notch, but has somehow managing to make a much smaller disaster far, far more exhilarating. The main reason for the film, though, is the death scenes, and this makes no mistake of offering up incredibly brutal and bloody kills that are bloody and exciting. Of special mention is the one in the tanning booth, which starts off thinking that the accident will be a malfunctioning bed, but quickly goes up a notch and goes off into a really gruesome series that is quite exciting and really out-of-control and over-the-top. It’s the single most brutal one there is, and remains the high-point of the film. The accident in the hardware store comes in a close second, if only for the long and really drawn-out set-up before the actual kill, and the twist to it works wonderfully. To reveal anymore about the deaths would spoil them to an unnecessary degree, and being as it’s the reason to watch these, won’t. The method for sighting the clues necessary to stop the design is also a nice twist, meaning that the two leads are on sight for the deaths of their classmates, acting like investigators for a death that has yet to occur. It’s a somewhat intriguing spin, making our heroes more active and mirroring our own sense of morbid fascination in trying to figure out how the seemingly random events leading up to a character's death will play out to the payoff. While not the best one there is, it’s still a fun ride.
The Bad News: There some problems associated with the movie. This sticks to the usual slasher and horror conventions that idiots will die in the most moronic way ever, and it’s a little tiring to see it. For as much as it praises to be about twisting the genre conventions around, to pull a hackneyed one is pretty hard to believe. Don’t go looking for logic in the elaborate set-ups before a character’s death. It’s like every implausible element that will impact or contribute towards someone’s death will be looked into, and the coincidence might make you shake your head at the sheer audacity of it all. Even if Death’s looking for you and all angles must be covered, the fact that these are so off-the-wall and implausible is a little hard to take in. Idiocy also contributes here, since most of them openly go into places once the secret’s out where anything could happen, such as the aforementioned hardware store, and there’s seemingly endless ways to kill a person through an accident in there, leaving most of the suspense at the door. The biggest one, though, is the sense of discovery being completely gone, having experienced this scenario two times before, and as the central characters here are not the quick learners of the previous installment, that it takes so long to point out the signs and clues is really tiring. It’s not that bad, but it’s still not as great as the other ones where.
The Final Verdict: While not a classic like the first two, this is still a reasonably entertaining film that has some bright spots and some really low ones included. Fans of the series will definitely like this one, while those who have seen the first two should decide if trading suspense and logic for extra gore and nudity is a worthwhile one, as it’s all been-there-done-that feel to it.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Nudity, Graphic Language and a non-bloody animal killing