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User Reviews for: Final Destination

drqshadow
4/10  5 months ago
When a teenage student, about to depart for an international field trip, gets *that* feeling on the tarmac, he abruptly exits the aircraft. Five other kids and a teacher follow suit (including one classmate who’s weirdly eager to throw hands over the matter), then observe from the gate as the plane goes fireball a few moments later. Not long after that, death comes seeking his due, mowing through the survivors in a string of unfortunate “accidents” while the kids flail about, desperate to make sense of the predicament before it’s their turn.

I could’ve done without the grim reaper as a creeping physical entity (especially when it inexplicably cleans up after itself in one absurd post-murder scene) and the whole nonsense about a master plan that insists these kids die in a certain order is awfully stupid. Conveniently leaking toilets, sparking power lines, teetering kitchen knives, those are also silly, but I’d be willing to suspend disbelief and let ‘em slide in the name of good fun if not for the added touch of so many shadowy silhouettes and tell-tale gusts of wind. Subtlety is not among _Final Destination_’s limited virtues. Besides the girl who gets up-close and personal with a city bus, you’ll see every kill coming a mile away. They’re virtually telegraphed in full frame, step by step, in the preceding minutes. This doesn’t make the payoffs less rewarding, necessarily, but it’s so blunt and obvious about everything that I felt like I’d lost a few IQ points before the story was over.

Originally written as a spec script for _The X-Files_ before being expanded into its own standalone film, the plot doesn’t feel much heavier for the experience. It even retains a set of Scully and Mulder stand-ins to chase loose threads and narrowly miss the action. With a bad script, bad acting and bad production values, _Final Destination_ is only partly rescued by its wonderful flair for death scenes. Otherwise, it’s about as loose and dumb as it gets, and its tendency for beating us over the head with prophecy made me wonder if we were the next victims on death’s little itinerary.
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