Monday, Aug. 31, 2009

Gory 'Final Destination' fails in originality

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Given that every other horror franchise in the history of sequels tries to take its later entries in a different direction from the first one, the guys running Final Destination are either remarkably confident in the staying power of their concept or hilariously disinterested in giving us anything new.

That's not a completely foolish instinct. Hellraiser 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street 2 both tried to take their worlds to a bold new frontier, and the results were so foul you don't pluck those DVDs out of their cases, you hose them out.

-- Times, trailer, theaters.

That's the lesson: when you take chances, you risk sucking. But at least those abominably bad risk-taking sequels are memorably bad (even if it's in the same way you remember mistaking a spittoon for your hat). It's been just over two days since I saw The Final Destination, and already I can barely separate it from the three that came before it.

At a raceway, Bobby Campo has a vision of a horrible accident that will kill himself and all his friends. Acting quickly, he's able to save them and several bystanders.

But then they start dying in a new series of accidents -- in the same order they died in Campo's vision. To stop them all from meeting a gruesome end, Campo must break the chain of fate again to stop Death once and for all.

If that sounds familiar, that's because The Final Destination's plot is more or less identical to the three that came before it: dude thwarts death, death comes back with a fresh new look, all of dude's friends get slaughtered in appalling ways by a sequence of events so complicated I had to trick three WSU interns into working for me just to keep track of it. Most of the deaths involved machines, though, so if you want to live out the rest of the year, I'd move to one of those pre-industrial sections of the Amazon right away. Nothing dangerous ever happens there.

Well, so writer Eric Bress isn't interested in swapping up the franchise's formula. How dare he deprive us of his imagination when he's carrying around the brain responsible for The Butterfly Effect! At least once you know exactly how the plot's going to play out you can kick back and enjoy the uninteresting characters dying in interesting ways.

The Final Destination series has always been something of a guilty pleasure for me. Despite the fact they're dumb as hell (and hell's so dumb it had to repeat the third grade), the filmmakers behind them have always been committed to giving the audience what it wants, which in this case means people being forced bodily through chain-link fences. The gore in The Final Destination is messy and frequent, and if it's a little crass, it's also funny and good-spirited. Director David R. Ellis makes watching some muscly idiot get his guts sucked out his orifices every bit as grand as you've always imagined.

I hope that's all you want, though, because its characters have less personality than my carpet (I spill a lot), and though Bress and Ellis try to throw a couple curveballs into their screwed-out story, their duh-duh attempt at an ending is more of a "we didn't care enough to come up with anything better"-ball.

Then again, most of its 82 minutes feature either a room or a person exploding all over the place. Know that, when I attach an embarrassingly low grade to the end of this thing, the "D" secretly stands for "delightful."

Grade: D+